


Not Just Another Assignment

by Ecarden



Series: Another Assignment [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Ant man and the wasp - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Murder, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-27 11:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30122202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ecarden/pseuds/Ecarden
Summary: Book 2 of Assignments--Ava is definitely dead. Coulson and May are definitely furious. People are definitely going to die. Things are definitely going to blow up. And I will stop overusing the word 'definitely'. Maybe.
Series: Another Assignment [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2202837
Kudos: 8





	1. Previously On Assignments

This is Book 2 of the Assignments series, following “Just Another Assignment.” If you haven’t read that, you may want to. However, if you read it a long time ago, or just felt like skipping it, a brief description (spoilers abound for Ant Man and the Wasp, Avengers, Black Panther and Just Another Assignment):

Agents Phil Coulson and Melinda May (Agents of SHIELD) were sent to retrieve young Ava Starr (Ant Man and the Wasp) after the accident that killed her parents and left Ava with the power to walk through walls. It was an awesome, but unfortunately painful and eventually terminal, power. Therefore the agents began looking into a cure for the girl.

After some few issues with Hank Pym and John Garrett, ending with one of them fired and the other satisfied (mostly), Coulson and May recognized that vibranium, with its vibration absorbing nature might be the only solution to Ava’s wasting away. With Captain America’s shield still lost with the man himself somewhere in the Atlantic, they focused instead on Ulysses Klaue and the criminal group Intelligencia who’d located some of the fabled material.

Some failed raids, dead agents and the uncovering of a Wakandan agent in SHIELD. That let them carry out a more successful raid which left them with information about Klaue’s whereabouts. Another raid and they had vibranium and a very dead Ulysses Klaue. Most of the vibranium was returned to the Wakandans, with the remainder being kept by SHIELD secretly.

Of that remainder, some was allocated to the creation of a collar which would prevent Ava’s degradation and death, though it also removed her abilities while wearing it.

And then there was a massive fiery explosion in the lab where Ava had lived under the care of SHIELD/May/Coulson for almost three years.

And now, Book 2, Not Just Another Assignment.


	2. 1995—All Lives End, All Hearts Are Broken, Caring Is Not An Advantage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Investigation of the explosion does not go well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title here is a quote from Sherlock. Canon-typical levels of violence throughout.

Coulson’s dropped Foster’s body into the arms of the paramedics who’d arrived in response to fire, smoke and explosions. The guards had been dead when he reached the door to the lab, fighting his way through smoke, fire and debris. There shouldn’t have been so much smoke, or fire as the building was made of metal and glass. That did provide an abundance, indeed, an overabundance, of dangerous debris, which was indeed evident. Regardless of what logic said, fire had burned at his arms and smoke squeezed into his lungs through the handkerchief he held over his nose and mouth.

He’d made it into the lab, stepping over the corpses of Johnson and Haverford, two of May’s handpicked guards, without slowing down. There was no need to check if they were dead, as shrapnel had decapitated Johnson and taken Haverford’s leg off at the knee, which had stopped bleeding when the poor man’s heart had stopped. Feet sticky with the dead man’s blood, Coulson had reached Ava’s room, only to find the place shattered and a child’s corpse, burned beyond recognition, decapitated and with the twisted remnants of a SHIELD badge lay on the ground of the room below hers, as the explosion had shattered the floor.

A moment of horrified silence had been shattered by Dr. Foster’s coughing, desperate plea for help, prompted by the sight of Coulson’s loafers passing in front of the scientist’s face on his way to Ava’s room. Training took over and Coulson got the man out and to the paramedics as the firefighters were moving in.

SHIELD’s Academy of Science and Technology had excellent first responders, as was to be expected in a place which combined high explosives, dangerous chemicals and students. They were equipped with top-of-the-line gear and moved through the building easily, gathering survivors and putting out fires as an external team brought in trucks and emergency gear to ensure the four story lab building didn’t come down on the firefighters, or the gathering throng of rubbernecking students and faculty who’d been on campus in the middle of the night.

The paramedics had carried Foster off and the ratio of medics-to-wounded was low enough that one was even poking at Coulson’s arms, where unnoticed burns and small cuts were now beginning to make themselves felt through the wracking coughs which shook his entire body and took most of his focus.

The senior agent had operated on instinct to get into the lab and training to get out, but when the coughing finally stopped and the medic stepped away, leaving him bandaged and able to breathe, his brain began to work again.

The first thought, _what am I going to tell May?_ was not one he was proud of. The second thought, _what the hell happened?_ was not one he could answer and the main person who could have answered it was disappearing in an ambulance into the distance.

Which meant he needed a new scientist. Weaver would probably be good, but she wasn’t here and his brain wasn’t up to making phone calls. If he did, he had to start with May, and he couldn’t do that. Instead, his eye skipped through the crowd, looking for the most senior person present. The deputy director of the academy was there, in the throng.

Thirty seconds later, he had joined Coulson inside the tape and waving first responders who kept most of the crowd back. The man hadn’t had much in the way of choice in this as, despite his wounds, Coulson’s grip was like iron, bruising the man’s forearm through the lab coat he affected, though most of his time these days was spent doing administrative tasks. Indeed, he’d often, and loudly, complained in Coulson’s presence that he’d been promoted for being a good researcher into a position where he never got to do any research.

This was a problem Coulson could solve and did, with clear directives that the man find out what the hell had happened and bring along his best crime scene techs. Fortunately, they were at the spot which trained the folks who would answer the question of what happened, regardless of whether the answer was science bullshit, or more standard high explosives.

He would have answers.

* * *

May and Coulson were reading in silence. In and of itself, this was not an uncommon occurrence. May was not a chatty person at the best of times and Coulson, though usually very chatty, tended to focus in his entirety on a problem. His focus didn’t leave any brain power over for other things. The minor distractions, such as the bandages and burns still visible on his skin, wouldn’t affect that.

The atmosphere however was not nearly as collegially calm as usual. May had not been pleased by his delay in telling her the news and though Coulson had delayed long enough to regain some notion of calm and gain a few moments of sleep (which had also not pleased May) which provided enough self-control not to comment on the fact that security was her domain and it sure looked like security had been breached. May was still blaming herself, despite the lack of assistance from Coulson.

There was a great deal of tension in the air as they read the initial reports on the disaster. Especially as the vibranium, the other potential source of the problem, had been Coulson’s idea. Who was to blame was very much in doubt and neither of them wanted it to be them, or, frankly, wanted it to be their oldest friend in SHIELD.

“So their conclusion is that even the vibranium’s ability to absorb vibration has limits, which Ava exceeded, resulting in the violent release of all that energy, all at once, as the vibranium broke,” May said.

Coulson, who lacked the patience to read the entire report and had instead read the executive summary and was now digging through the appendices nodded slightly, very deliberately not reacting to the immense relief and slight triumph in May’s voice.

“No signs of any know explosive compound,” she continued.

Coulson nodded again, as he finally found what he was looking for.

“And no wounds on anyone, or anything in there except those caused by explosives.”

Coulson nodded again, finally finding what he was looking for. The crime scene techs and scientists had been thorough in inventorying everything and examining it at every available level. Most of it was useless, or distressing. The destroyed CDs, melting into some sort of abstract art piece over Ava’s teddy bear, the one vestige of her life before coming to SHIELD was particularly upsetting. But Coulson had been looking for something in particular. He’d found it and something was missing.

“Item 1123, One SHIELD badge, deformed from heat. Leather scorched. Plastic melted. ID unreadable. No trace elements,” he read aloud.

May shook her head slightly, head drooping in a futile attempt at denial of the situation. “The badge you always left with her…”

“Yes, indeed. A gesture quite a few people knew about.”

May’s head snapped back up, eyes locking on Coulson’s face, a horrible hope there.

“What no one knew about was the tracking device hidden in it.”

You could see the questions of why he’d hidden a tracking device in his own badge and why he hadn’t told her about it trying to escape his mouth, but hope beat indignation, fortunately for both their tempers. “And it’s still working?”

“I’d have told you. It only transmits intermittently to save on battery life. Once a day and I haven’t received any signal since the explosion,” Coulson said.

“Then what does—no trace elements—what was the tracker made of?”

“Standard SHIELD periodic tracker—there’s iron, like that of the badge,” a holdover from the SSR days, “certainly no leather, and while there’s some plastic, there’s lots of other stuff as well.”

“Those trackers aren’t very powerful. Blocking them isn’t exactly hard,” May noted.

Coulson nodded.

May deflated slightly, “But it’s possible the tracker melted in some weird way, or the lab tech missed it, or someone else made a mistake, hardly definitive enough for SHIELD to take action. And even if it was, we don’t know what action we should take. We don’t know who did it.”

“We don’t _know_ ,” Coulson agreed. “But we do know that the Wakandans didn’t give a shit about Ava’s life before and we do _know_ that they’ve never stopped squawking about their precious fucking vibranium. _And_ we do _know_ that they’ve got unexpected capabilities.

“But we don’t know it was them,” May said, taking the unusual role, for her, of the voice of reason.

“You are correct. I will keep an open mind towards the idea that someone else is responsible and just hold the notion that it was fucking Wakanda and their vibranium craziness as the guess that it is. If it should prove right, however,” Coulson’s smile was one May hadn’t seen since the interrogation of the Intelligencia leadership, and frankly, had hoped never to see again, “ _I will rain hellfire down upon them until I burn them to ash._ ”

“ _We_ will rain down hellfire upon them,” May corrected him, then took a deep breath and forced herself back under control. “If you’re right.”

Coulson nodded and came back to reality. “So, we need to convince Fury to let us open an investigation and we need to be careful, because only SHIELD personnel knew about that badge—“

“And about my security measures,” May interrupted.

“If this is anything but what the scientists think it is, then they had to penetrate those,” Coulson agreed.

“I don’t believe anyone who hadn’t at least seen them, and preferably been briefed on them, could have slipped through without problems. Especially carrying the decapitated corpse of another teenage girl to drop, then get out carrying Ava…”

“We have a mole,” Coulson said.

“If Ava was taken,” May agreed with him and cautioned him at the same time.

“And who do we know who has put a mole inside SHIELD?”

“Literally every single government that signed onto the treaty at some point or another?” May offered, deliberately not taking the bait he was offering.

“Who has put a mole inside SHIELD looking for vibranium?” he clarified.

“Only Wakanda has succeeded, to my knowledge. But I bet if we ask we’ll find every mining company and plenty of nations have tried. Besides, why would the Wakandans bother with this? If they could prove we had the vibranium, they’d just have gone to the Council, or the press and made Fury give it back,” May argued, in a long speech, for her.

A muscle jumped in Coulson’s jaw. “We’ll know more once the DNA results come in on everyone,” he said.

“You ordered DNA tests on the bodies?” May asked, surprised. The technology was relatively new, slow and extremely expensive. Still, every SHIELD agent gave up samples and Ava had been poked and prodded and studied enough that her blood, hair and bone marrow was in half a dozen labs around the campus and at other SHIELD sites.

“Unfortunately, dental records are not really possible for whatever girl they dumped in Ava’s bedroom, or Johnson.”

Neither head had been located, despite an extensive search of the ruined building.

“Suspicious, that,” May admitted.

* * *

“Let me check if the results are back, sir” Doctor Karen Lingenfelter said, with the forced smile of a woman who’d been asked the same question every hour for the last three days. The blonde doctor was tall and cadaverously thin. Despite being a recent graduate of Sci-Tech, she’d been assigned to the coroner’s office as the new liaison between the more scientific aspects of that office (other uses for corpses, besides burning or burying) and the medical side (what killed people and who had they been).

She’d actually argued that she should also, therefore, be the liaison to big SHIELD on things like this. At the moment, she rather regretted that choice even if it did prove to be good for her career in the long run.

Her computer loudly announced that she had mail. A brief glance at it and she smiled in slight relief as her eyes flickered over the screen, reading the words from the offsite tech. “Sir, I can report that the test is complete and the each of the pair of samples is a match to the control samples.”

There was a moment of silence and she continued speaking. “Those are the bodies of Ava Starr and Killian Johnson.”

There was a longer moment of silence. “I’m sorry sir.”

“Send me the complete reports,” Coulson said.

“Yes, sir, as soon as they come in. I’ve only got the initial results at the moment. It takes time for the rest to—“ Lingenfelter’s babbling as Coulson declined to cut her off continued for almost a full minute before she ran out of words and excuses for the senior agent.

“Send me the reports as soon as you receive them,” he said when she’d finally trailed off into awkward silence.

“Yes, sir!”

She hung up the phone and began to type desperately. There was a _lot_ of work to be done and not much time to do it in, at least if she didn’t want to end up on Coulson’s shit list. And she didn’t want to end up on Coulson’s shit list.

* * *

Coulson was not crying. He stared in silence at the screen, face a mask. May stood across the room, watching the door, so she didn’t have to watch him. This was the tenth day since the labs had confirmed Ava was dead. It was the twenty third day since she had died. It was the nineteenth time she had been in this room while Coulson stared at a screen, waiting for his tracker to send its signal.

Every day it should have sent the signal at the same time. If it still existed.

No signal had been received in twenty-two days.

No signal was received on the twenty-third day either.

Coulson’s mask sank a little bit deeper into his soul and he rose and went back to work, trailed by May, who’d done her mourning at home, with her husband and couldn’t figure out how to make Coulson do his.

Andrew was suggesting a funeral, or a wake, or something to mark her passing. But with a Board of Inquest examining the loss of millions of dollars in equipment, three lives and with Dr. Foster still in intensive care, this wasn’t the moment to suggest it.

After some thought on the matter, noting that her surviving guards were dispersed and furious with…everything and hardly appropriate confidants for the far-more-senior Coulson in any case, she remembered Doctor Weaver. Though not as senior as Coulson, yet, she’d advanced quite a bit over the last few years acting as Ava’s tutor and freestanding adviser to Coulson and May whenever they had an odd problem. Besides, she wasn’t in Operations, or Communications, the two places Coulson spent his time. With—May forced herself to continue the thought—with Ava…gone—her mind flinched away slightly from the euphemism, but she couldn’t go further at the moment—Weaver wasn’t in Coulson’s chain of command in any way.

“We should check on Dr. Weaver,” she recommended, out of the clear blue sky, from Coulson’s perspective. One hand flicked out to temporarily stop the elevator they were in at that moment.

His eyes flicked over to her, “Safety?” he asked, shortly.

“No, information,” May responded, a little cryptically to anyone who knew her less well than Coulson.

“Then we shouldn’t. Too much appearance of witness tampering while the Board is still investigating.”

He reached out for the button to restart the elevator and she caught his hand as it passed. “Talk to Weaver, or me, or Andrew, or someone,” she said, holding his hand for a long moment, meeting his eyes evenly.

“That’s what you do when someone’s dead. When someone’s missing, you go find them,” he said patiently.

May released him, “And the DNA?” she asked, as his hand extended towards the button. It shook.

“Mistakes have been made in the past,” his voice was level, despite the shaking of his hands and his darting eyes trying to avoid her own stare.

May didn’t push any further. For now.

* * *

On the twenty-eighth day since the explosion, two days before the Board of Inquiry’s initial report Coulson sat in his office, staring at the screen as information streamed in from SHIELD’s satellite network. More precisely, he was staring at an absence of information. The bug was built to transmit only once a day, which was why its battery would last approximately sixty days. Usually that wasn’t a problem, as he swapped out the bug for a new one every time he took his badge back. Without that as an option, he was running out of time.

The Board of Inquiry was investigating the explosion and any involvement beyond answering their questions would be viewed as a potential cover-up (which he didn’t care about at this moment) and ensure he had no access to SHIELD resources to find Ava (which he did care about at this moment), or avenge her (which he couldn’t think about at any moment). His request that they look into the Wakandan angle had been met with polite but firm refusal to discuss the state of the investigation.

Doctor Foster was out of the ICU, but he wasn’t providing any useful answers, as he was still quite drugged as the burns continued to heal and they tried to get him to do some physical therapy.

Doctor Weaver had provided what information she could, but no one except the Wakandans, who weren’t talking, and Klaue, who May had shot, knew anything about vibranium.

Except Stark.

May had stopped him from having a quiet word with Agent Hartley and the team on Stark detail. Instead, it had been turned over to the Board of Inquiry, who, with their shiny badges and shinier shoes were not getting anywhere with the playboy inventor. Stark’s hatred for SHIELD had not decreased as his parent’s death passed into history.

Coulson stared at the screen without looking at it. Among his colleagues, he was known for being a patient man. In training exercises and in the field, he preferred to shape the situation so that his enemy would make a mistake, then wait for them to make it. Once they’d done that, ensuring they remained in a dependent, hopeless position was simple enough. Do it right and they’d beg to surrender.

But that was different. Waiting to spring, was different from simply waiting.

And then his patience was rewarded, and the tracker beeped to life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments always welcome.


	3. 1995—Caring Is An Advantage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coulson and May follow a signal, along with the support assigned to them, John Garrett.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of violence in this one.

“Up and at ‘em Starr,” one of the guards said, kicking her bedframe to wake her up.

Ava’s eyes opened and she rose as slowly as she could get away with. May was dead. Coulson had left. And it was all her fault. She’d killed everyone. Again. She wished they hadn’t bothered to save her life. But they had. And she owed them. They’d made that clear. She had to earn her keep here.

May’s training was good, but it hurt to use it. It hurt more not to, when she was up against fully trained agents. Still, her abilities let her hold her own. And sometimes Johnson came by with a special meal. He was the only one of the agents at the lab who’d stuck around. And survived.

It was funny. With May, she’d always wanted more training. Now she had more training and she only wanted May.

Still, it helped to hit things. To hurt things. Especially since the collar was off, destroyed, and the pain was back in her life. Why not share it around? Besides, her trainers were mostly assholes. And she got things when she won. Yesterday she’d even gotten to go outside after she broke Diana’s arm in that last round.

This SHIELD needed her. And this way she could pay back SHIELD for all she’d cost them.

Maybe she could even earn her way back into Coulson’s good graces. But he wouldn’t talk to her. Couldn’t look at her, she’d been told. And wasn’t answering her letters. Still, she’d prove her worth. Then he’d _have_ to talk to her.

He would.

* * *

Dr. Foster was still too injured to travel. May wasn’t. Dr. Weaver wasn’t. The remaining three members off May’s security detail weren’t. That should have been enough.

The problem with that was twofold. First, the other surviving field agents had scampered away from the blast zone as the Board of Inquiry got closer and closer to issuing its initial findings. Second, even five field agents and a scientist weren’t enough to take on whatever force had successfully penetrated the Sci-Tech Academy and May’s absurd defenses.

Or so Fury felt. He could shake loose one of the new model of flying command centers and some gear, but he wasn’t going to do that if Coulson was just going to run off and get it blown up. In fact, Fury didn’t particularly want Coulson to go at all, but with the Board decision coming soon, it was probably the other agent’s only chance at keeping his job. Or at least still being field deployable.

So, Fury had a quiet word with another one of his protégés and Garrett agreed to skip some well-earned R&R to help Coulson out. Fury did not choose to share the nature of that help, because he didn’t want to, he didn’t have to, and he thought it would be funny.

Garrett was currently running a heavy operations team, continuing his long trend of intelligence gathering by extensive use of high explosives. Almost a dozen agents accompanied him onto the plane, along with enough firepower and explosives to breach a nuclear missile silo, kill the guards, disable the missiles, then collapse it so they couldn’t be recovered. Garrett knew that, because he’d done it. Coulson knew that because he’d helped. May knew that because she hadn’t been invited on that operation and had been _really,_ if quietly, pissed about it.

When they were in the air, Coulson briefed the team on the mission.

Garrett did not think it was funny. “Phil, we’re going here because after a month your machine beeped? Do you know how often we get false positives from this gear? SHIELD’s gone with the lowest bidder ever since Stark senior kicked it and Stark junior fucked off back to his mansion.”

“Then this will be a nice, quiet trip out to the secret compound in the middle of nowhere,” Coulson said, bringing the satellite surveillance up on the main screen behind him.

Whoever had done the camouflage for the place was pretty good, it was in one of the larger forested areas in the far east of Russia and the trees did a relatively good job of shielding the building from view, but it had been constructed right next to a logging trail after heavy logging in the area, new trees had been planted to shield the building. Other trees had grown back at a more natural pace, leaving a clear, block shaped bunch of trees which were simply the wrong age and size (though they had mostly matched type, but had gone for uniformity, rather than the mix that the actual forest nearby got).

A muscle jumped in Garrett’s jaw, but he was far too professional to disagree with that. The attempted concealment was obvious to anyone who’d examined satellite surveillance, which was everyone in the room, except Dr. Weaver, who was sitting in the corner, working her way through the initial scientific report the Board of Inquiry had just released. She was looking with some concern at the backup vibranium collar Coulson had had brought along in what might be considered an overabundance of hope. Or misappropriation of SHIELD resources.

The flight out was filled with mission planning for the senior folks, then naps, and naps followed by checking equipment for their juniors. The local SHIELD office had transport ready to go for them. Mostly it was several trucks, formerly military, now on the civilian market through means Coulson found it unwise to ask about. But they also provided one state-of-the-art communications and surveillance van, which Dr. Weaver claimed immediately for its high speed (almost a hundred KBPS) uplink to big SHIELD. Seeing her take ferocious possession of the computers, no one else was willing to fight her on it, even if it meant a long trip on shitty logging trails in a vehicle whose shocks had died sometime in the Carter administration.

Bumps did not stop Coulson and May from catnapping alternately as they drove out towards the hidden building. Nor did concern over what they were going to find. Still, one of them was always awake, right up until they reached the closest they were comfortable coming by vehicle and hopped out. Coulson had abandoned his usual suit for heavier combat gear, though he hadn’t collected an assault rifle, unlike the rest of the team. May wore her usual light combat gear, though in a forest camouflage, rather than the usual blue and black.

The rest of Garrett’s team wore the same camouflaged heavy armor as Coulson and their commander. A handful of hand signals from Garrett left one of his men behind to guard Weaver and the locked van she was sitting in, which was also their only line of communication should this all go horribly wrong. The other members of Garrett’s team split up and vanished into the woods with the skill of SHIELD agents who’d undergone the special brand of hell Garrett called training. Agent Brock Rumlow, Garrett’s specialist, stuck with the senior agents and the four of them worked their way through the woods.

Coulson was by far the least stealthy of them. Fortunately, with May ranging ahead and Rumlow behind, they’d have plenty of warning before anyone came within earshot of them. Or maybe they wouldn’t have any warning and the person would just die. That was also possible when dealing with SHIELD specialists. 

They reached the perimeter defenses of the building to find a hole in them, created by May, who was waiting at the hole. Coulson gave Garrett a slight wave and the other agent gave a series of vigorous hand signals intended to get Coulson to stay put and let Rumlow and May handle the infiltration. Those were easily ignored and Garrett was far too professional to speak out loud at the perimeter defenses, despite May’s creation of a hole in those defenses.

May herself gave Coulson a sharp look, but when he met her glare evenly she didn’t argue further. He moved much more quietly now that they were in the less wild, more travelled confines of the building’s perimeter defenses. Rumlow and Garrett remained behind, to come in heavy when things got loud.

They reached the building after only a minute’s travel, passing no guards along the way. It was a sprawling mostly wooden structure, clearly constructed from local trees. The metal doors were not local. Instead they were standard security doors, like those used by intelligence and military groups around the globe. Except these had quite high-end electronic locks, not the more common physical ones. After identifying the security cameras and noting an angle at which they were blocked by local vegetation, May slid forward, producing the small device local SHIELD had included in their communications van and a tiny screwdriver.

A moment of quiet examination and she put the screwdriver away, as the device was welded in place, not screwed. A flashed hand sign and Coulson produced a small vial of acid and passed it over. A silent examination of the lock later, she pulled the stopped and pressed the ‘brush’ on the end (a rather expensive ceramic which wasn’t harmed by the quite virulent acid in the vial) into a specific part of the lock’s cover, creating a hole. She unspooled a wire with small clamps on the end from the device and slid it through the hole, snagging the internal wiring. Ten seconds later the door was open.

After a moment of hesitation, May took the pistol holstered under Coulson’s arm, leaving him the one at his belt, which he drew in turn. They entered the building silently and together, covering all angles and moved forward until they heard steps coming towards them. A man, white, mid-forties, fit, was coming towards them, reading some papers he held in his hand. Then a man, white, mid-forties, fit, was unconscious in May’s hands. Then he was shoved into a closet, after being thoroughly searched, bound and gagged. May handed a pistol and a SHIELD ID over to Coulson, who’d been guarding the closet.

He stared at the ID for a moment, then pulled out his own and did a quick comparison. As far as he could tell, standing here in a random hallway with no equipment beyond that needed to break down doors and kill people, it was a real SHIELD badge.

He didn’t speak. Instead, he shrugged and passed the badge back to May.

She raised an eyebrow and glanced at the bound-and-gagged, apparent, SHIELD agent. Coulson shrugged again and they moved out, following what would have been the right way to go to head to the main security office of a SHIELD facility. As they weren’t entirely certain whether the badge was real, or fake, they did not finish off the unconscious man, despite the risk in leaving him alive and behind them.

Security had been tight, though not impenetrable on the exterior, but there were no visible security cameras within the facility. The only other places Coulson had seen that pattern were interrogation, or research facilities where really nasty shit was done and the people working there didn’t _want_ any sort of recordings of what they’d been up to. The thought of Ava alone in such a facility made his skin crawl, but he kept his steps smooth and slow, listening for any approaching steps.

The security center had another of the heavy metal high-security doors on it, which had been left open. The guard heard them coming, despite their precautions and said, without looking up, “If you brought me decaf again, I swear I’m going to—“ he stopped talking because he was unconscious and he was unconscious because May was in the room. Coulson joined her and this time he bound and gagged the man, retrieving another, apparently authentic, SHIELD badge, as well as what looked like standard gear for a SHIELD security monitor.

Without any signals or discussion, May took up position to ambush the coffee fetcher the, now unconscious, guard had been waiting for, while Coulson shoved the man under the desk and got to work on the system. It was still unlocked as the guard hadn’t logged out before he’d been knocked unconscious.

Coulson flicked through the security systems, which weren’t great. They were lower tier SHIELD models, which looked an awful lot like standard corporate models, just with one or two minor changes which meant the usual methods of overriding the corporate models instead set off alarms. He was beginning to get worried that this actually was a SHIELD facility, rather than something pretending to be a SHIELD facility. If that was the case though, the Director should have simply told him, or if Ava had been taken away due to Fury’s displeasure with his lack of speed in investigating her abilities, the base should have been abandoned, or Coulson ordered not to raid it.

Something wasn’t making much sense here.

Fortunately, the security system made perfect sense to a graduate of the SHIELD Communication’s Academy and ensuring no signal went out and no alarms went off was easy enough. A quick flick through the rest of the systems showed six more rooms with heavy duty security doors. It was a bit difficult to determine where in the building they were, but the guards should have key cards.

A moment’s thought and a quiet word in May’s ear had the door closed with May outside it. When it opened again, to reveal Coulson working at the command console, shoving all files he could onto a single hard drive, the coffee-fetcher didn’t even have time to ask what was going on before May took him out, retrieved his key card and quietly muttered the combination he’d used to access the room to Coulson. Unfortunately, the codes were undoubtedly individualized and likely didn’t give access to all sections of the facility. Still, it was better than nothing.

By the time she’d restrained the second guard, well away from the first, Coulson had pulled everything he could out of the system and carefully removed a hard drive, adding it to his bag of supplies. There was a radio jammer in the building, along with the monitor he’d been able to disable from the security room. Unfortunately, the jammer was not connected to any external system, it was merely discussed in the security plans (helpfully kept in the security room, which they now occupied).

Coulson placed one charge under the security console and headed off towards the jammer, which was in one of the other secure rooms. It was tempting to just go in search of Ava, but being able to call for help and inform the rest of the team what they’d found (and that they’d disabled the security system) had a greater chance of actually resulting in Ava’s successful extraction.

So, the pair gritted their teeth and moved out.

The room containing the radio jammer also contained the armory, which was, unsurprisingly, locked and probably guarded. After a moment’s hesitation, Coulson shimmied out of his body armor and stalked inside, unlocking the door and walking in like he was an innocent (HA!) agent of SHIELD (true enough) here to talk with the armory clerk about a pistol, with a silencer, which he’d found in the hall.

Thirty seconds later Coulson had shot the man three times. Muscle memory made a tight grouping over the man’s heart. Well, visibly over the man’s heart, actually right through it, resulting in a gush of blood which forced Coulson to dodge if he didn’t want to be painted with the stuff. 

He’d have preferred not to kill anyone, but honestly, the clerk was a giant who’d came out from the locked, bulletproof cage that made up the armory carrying an extremely large and intimidating metal tool. Coulson’s lips curled slightly in irritation at himself, even as his body automatically moved to block the closing armory door. A second charge went on the base’s store of explosives. The radio jammer died as Coulson unplugged it and made a few modifications so plugging it back in wouldn’t solve the problem.

As he was doing that, May was reporting in to Garrett and the external team, which had been on a communication’s blackout. After a moment of hesitation, Coulson insisted on maintaining the blackout with big SHIELD as he wasn’t entirely confident in his reasoning which said big SHIELD couldn’t really be involved in whatever this was. Even if he was right, whoever this was had access to gear which looked an awful lot like SHIELD’s. Perhaps there was a subverted quartermaster somewhere, who might hear if they reported in.

He did report the death of the clerk. To Garrett’s unexpected complaint. The other agent was one of SHIELD’s more bloody-handed operatives, concerned with mission success and leaving collateral damage to the PR department, as he put it. Still, what might, just might, be friendly fire did trouble the ex-military Garrett.

Coulson chose not to be troubled by it and May’s position was clearly that if Ava really was here, then everyone in the building, SHIELD or not, needed to die. If she wasn’t, then there would be problems. But for the moment, she was trusting Coulson on that topic, despite his…instability over the last few weeks.

With that done, they moved quickly in the direction of the next security-door locked room, which was a lab, conveniently empty, as it was late in the evening by this point. The second was also an abandoned lab. The third was a room filled with computer servers.

Coulson swore silently to himself, torn between multiple duties. After a moment of hesitation, he passed the keycard to May and began work on the computers. Not really attempting to penetrate the heavy encryption on them, but attempting to figure out what was the minimum amount of material he needed to extract from the servers in order to get as much of the files as possible. That, combined with how to ensure the system didn’t self-destruct when the raid began or when he pulled the hard-drives kept him busy as May continued on her journey, alone. Despite her vociferous, but quiet objections, she obeyed.

* * *

The very next door May opened had a woman in a lab coat inside it. She didn’t even consider attempting deception, rather going straight for her preferred means of conflict resolution. Violence. The woman was unconscious when a tiny form, too tiny to be an adult, jumped through the wall, reacting to the sound of the fight (not that the woman had made noise, but bouncing her head off the table had knocked several large, heavy pieces of lab equipment to the floor, which made noise).

The figure froze.

“May?” Ava asked, staring in complete shock.

May was frozen solid. Until this moment, she hadn’t believed the girl could possibly be alive. So certain of the worst-case scenario, it took her a ridiculous amount of time to realize that the worst had not happened.

“Ava?” she asked, forcing her mouth to move, then wincing at the cliché which had dropped from it.

“You’re alive?” Ava winced herself. “Of course you are, I knew he had to be wrong,” she threw herself at May who gathered the girl up into a massive hug, burying her face in dark, poofy hair, inhaling the scent of the wrong fucking shampoo, but also of Ava herself, home and safe and…neither of those things, in fact.

Someone was going to _die_ for that. For not being home, for not being safe, for the little bit of callous cruelty that was not finding the right _fucking_ shampoo for the girl. Someone was going to die.

“He? Who, he?” she asked after the hug began to get a little bit awkward.

“Agent Garrett, he said—“ Ava stopped as May’s face darkened, fury breaking her usual iron control and Ava tried to pull back. May almost stopped her automatically, but then remembered how much the girl hated to be restrained and released her.

“Garrett was involved in this?” she asked, voice bleak as a death sentence.

“Yeah, he said you died in the explosion…in my explosion. But I _knew_ he had to be wrong! I knew _I_ couldn’t kill _you_!”

May nodded absently, mind racing. She took Ava a step forward, so she couldn’t see, then turned back and savagely stomped on the stunned woman’s skull. The first kick fractured her skull, the second drove bone and boot into her brain, killing her. The sound was horrible, but there wasn’t much that could be done about that and she was in a hurry.

May’s pistol (Coulson’s actually, but she’d kept it) came out into her hand as she moved through the silent hall, Ava taking up position behind her, obedient to the older woman’s tension and quiet command, she was holding onto May’s belt and keeping up. Despite the almost overwhelming urge to ask questions about everything she kept quiet.

May went into the server room just as Coulson was prying a second hard drive loose. He dropped it, cursing silently as he spun bringing a gun up only to see May’s face. An audible curse rose in his throat, then turned to ash on its way to his lips when he saw the lack of sardonic amusement on May’s face. And the lack of triumph, despite the fact that he could see Ava’s head ducking out from behind May.

The girl looked at him with apprehension which melted away at his obvious relief and joy to see her and he swept her into a hug, lifting her off the ground easily, all concern about what had May pissed forgotten.

Or at least, it was pushed into the background.

For a moment.

May’s voice was quiet, but broke the moment. “Garrett’s a _fucking_ traitor. He told her she’d _killed me_.”

“Unfortunate. Do we know how many are on his side?”

“Have to assume it’s the entire team.”

“And we have to wonder about Fury, who assigned Garrett to us.”

“He could have just said we couldn’t come,” May argued.

“He _would_ have known that wouldn’t work,” Coulson countered.

A muscle jumped in May’s jaw, but she nodded slightly. “What next?” she asked her commanding officer.

“The thing about a conspiracy is, it doesn’t have to be everywhere if it can make you believe that it’s everywhere,” Coulson said, more to himself than May and spoke into his radio. “Weaver, I hate to say it, but Garrett’s right. Getting in is going to take quite a few bodies. Put me through to the Hub and let’s make sure that we’re not about to massacre our own people.”

“On it,” Weaver responded. “Hang on a moment, someone wants in,” she continued, distracted by an audible knock on the back of the armored van.

“DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR,” Coulson ordered, voice somehow sounding like a bellow despite the fact that the volume didn’t actually rise.

“Yes, sir,” Weaver said, startled, but obedient to the tone of command. Then there was an audible explosion over the broadcast. Her voice went flat as training took over. “Uplink destroyed. No external long-range communications,” her voice continued to report the agents who’d been guarding the armored van were disabling it even as she attempted to move from the communication’s console in the back to the driver’s seat, then she was overridden by Garrett’s amused voice.

“You know, Phil, I might have believed that story, if you hadn’t explained yourself. You never do that, except in front of that little Ghost of yours,” gunshots interrupted him, but Garrett kept speaking in his usual rough good humor. “Well, that and telling Weaver not to let my boys in. Bit of a giveaway that. You’re usually smoother.”

“Weaver and all loyal SHIELD agents, withdraw and report to command that John Garrett is a traitor. Take all necessary precautions to ensure your survival should whoever you report to turn out to be a traitor as well,” Coulson said on the open channel. Before he could give additional orders, alarms began to wail, despite his interference with the security room.

May and Coulson flicked their radios over to their independent backup channel, but he kept his earpiece on the open channel. Not that he expected Garrett to say anything real over that channel, but knowing what the man wanted him to hear was worth something. As he did that, May snatched the detonator from his belt and a moment later they’d set off their own explosions. Despite the destruction of the armory and security center (and their restrained and helpless staff) the alarm continued to blare.

“Your backup plan?” Coulson asked May. Ever since their first operation, when he’d pulled her out of the bay after their commander didn’t have an extraction plan in place, they’d always come up with their own backup plans. A practice May had continued even when he was the one coming up with the main plan and its official contingencies.

“There’s a ranger station ten miles from here, it’s manned and has a vehicle. And a phone. But the traitor’s team,” there were more gunshots, “or their survivors, are surrounding us. If we go out any of the exits…”

“And creating a new exit will draw a _lot_ of attention,” Coulson noted, tapping the explosives he carried.

“I could get us out,” Ava said.

May and Coulson glanced down at her and she resisted the urge to shrink back at the sudden impact of their full attention. May was always a hundred percent focused on whatever she was doing, but usually Coulson was distracted by a thousand different things, handling things with no more of his attention and focus than they needed. That attention had weight, but Ava knew how to stand up under it. Coulson and May had taught her that. “I learned how to take people with me through walls,” she explained. Pain and SHIELD’s…traitors?...had taught her that.

Coulson’s eyebrows rose. May nodded slight approval, the same way she did when Ava finally got a move precisely correct. “Does Garrett know?” Coulson asked.

Ava shrugged. “I don’t know. He wasn’t there, but it was in the lab a few weeks ago.”

Coulson nodded slightly. “May,” his voice was arctic, “Garrett will probably try to hold the perimeter and use the base’s internal forces to clear us out or force us out. We blew the armory,” he produced the two other pistols they’d taken from the guards in the security room and passed them over. “Kill them all. When Garrett has to come in, we’ll withdraw through the hole in the net,” he concluded, leaving out the fact that they couldn’t really know where that hole would be. “We’ll move to the next room with a security door and await you there, usual knock.”

May nodded. Three pistols, all standard issue Glocks. 17 rounds each, plus two extra magazines Coulson also provided gave her 85 rounds. Two rounds minimum per target. She’s simply have to hope there weren’t _that_ many people in the building, or that some of them had weapons she could borrow. There must have been security forces besides the two men in the security room, but with the armory destroyed before they were aware of the threat, the mostly unarmed staff were going to be helpless before the armed SHIELD specialist.

A glance at Ava as she considered asking the girl whether there was anyone May should spare ended when she decided against putting that burden on the teenager. “I can help!” Ava offered eagerly.

“We can both help by staying out of the way until May calls,” Coulson said quietly. “Half the job of being in charge is knowing when to get out of the way of your experts and let them do their job.”

Ava glared for a moment, with surprising animosity, then nodded and joined him. May moved off instantly as Coulson took the lead, Ava holding onto his belt to ensure they didn’t get separated. The next security room was near the main entrance, where Coulson expected Garrett to breach. The theory being that the hole in his perimeter would appear where Garrett expected himself and his team to block it. The lab was quiet, though the twisted mice in the corner and the airlocked off lab suggested they were doing some sort of biological or chemical weapons research.

They’d heard the beginning of the combat as they’d walked, as May was making no effort to conceal her position, indeed she was trying to be noticed. The better to draw fire away from her protectees.

“You know, Phil, none of this would have been necessary if you hadn’t gotten all attached. Do you _know_ what we could do with someone like her? Able to walk through walls? Rip a man’s heart out with her bare hands? After the trouble you put me through just to get her to open the door it was obvious you’d never let her do real work,” Garrett spoke over the compromised channel, clearly trying to bait Coulson into responding. As the other agent had no interest in demonstrating to Garrett that he and May had separated, he ignored the traitor’s ongoing attempts at provocation.

Ava and Coulson spent the next little while discussing how she’d been, bad, how he’d been, bad, and how their situation was, also bad. When she told him that she’d been told he’d left because she’d killed May, she got to see what rage looked like on the man. “I will never abandon you, Ava.”

“I’ll know better, next time.”

“Let’s hope there isn’t a next time.”

Gunfire and the occasional scream interrupted them and neither of them took their eye, or Coulson’s gun, off the locked security door.

* * *

Most of the staff had clearly not picked up a gun since they completed their initial training. Even if they had been armed, they wouldn’t have been a match for May. With their armory destroyed, they came at her with a surprising array of improvised weapons. Cooking knives, a frying pan and a wide array of odd lab equipment. The security forces, such as they were, were gathering at the armory, seeking surviving weapons, she was sure.

May had had a _very_ bad month. Garrett turning traitor was the least of it. Despite working together on a dozen operations over her almost thirteen years of service to SHIELD, she’d never liked him. He didn’t have a light touch and she’d always preferred the stiletto to the air strike. Not that she showed it now. Unleashing the fury and pain of the last month was a thing of joy indeed.

Elbow snapping back to crush the windpipe of a man who thought he’d snuck up on her, May stripped the knife from his hand and grabbed him by the hair, spinning his about-to-be corpse into the woman who’d tried to distract her. The woman screamed something in tearful Russian, accent so thick that May could only make out the word ‘husband’ from underneath the dying man. A bending slash as May walked past ended her screams and her life.

The next two were the security forces outer perimeter, watching the halls near the armory. Arrogance led them to try to engage her instead of running for their fellows. They’d been well trained, in SHIELD style, but there were weaknesses to that, as there are weaknesses to everything. And no one had given them the advanced training needed to cover those weaknesses. The first punch was to drive her into his comrade, but instead she stepped inside the reach of his arm, not back and as the fist slid past her she drove the knife up through the bottom of his jaw, nailing tongue to the top of his mouth, then through the skull into the brain.

The second guard stared as she left the blade in place rather than seek to wrest it free from bone and tissue. Trained instinct brought his hands up to deflect the first attack and swung towards her stomach, forcing her to spin back and away. She turned that into a spinning back kick which knocked him to the ground. Following him down, May closed for the grapple, only for him to finally realize he needed help and scream for it.

May recoiled and he smiled, pleased to have put her on her back foot and surged to his feet, only to recoil himself when her borrowed pistol came out and parsimoniously shot him once in the face. Without a moment of hesitation, she moved forward to the turn in the hallway that led towards the armory and listened, controlling her own breathing carefully to keep it from interfering with her senses. People were running in this direction, but she had a few moments.

She fell prone and poked her head around the corner and saw four men just rounding the other end of the hall, fifty feet away. They’d clearly expected her to run away from the screams and were hoping to catch up, but they still moved in a trained formation and were armed with apparently functional weapons scavenged from the destroyed armory and full body armor which apparently had been stored somewhere else. With only seconds to act, she lifted the gun and began to fire.

Her first shot, carefully aimed, took the point man in the throat, the rest, more hurriedly fired at the scattering group of guards knocked two down, but from the cursing and wheezing, their body armor had kept them alive. The last of the quartet managed to duck into a doorway providing some cover and aim his rifle down towards May, opening up a flurry of shots as she pulled back and away. The heavy rounds punched through plaster walls like they weren’t even there, slamming into and splintering the heavy wooden floorboards May had been lying on.

May was sprinting herself now, the layout of the halls they’d moved through laid out in her head like a map, she would circle around to the other end of the hall and hit them from behind it would only take moments. Her gunshot-deafened ears did not hear the trio of guards who were trying to do the same thing, only to her, until she literally ran into their point man at one of the corners.

They both reacted quickly, but May was a moment faster and the pistol in her hand was a bit easier to maneuver than the rifle the guard was carrying. A lucky snapshot went in under the brim of his helmet, but bounced off the back of it, ricocheting back into the dying man’s brain. His companions charged her furiously, lacking the scavenged weapons of their compatriot (and realizing that trying to remove the rifle from the sling binding it to the corpse of their leader was a good way to end up shot by May) they closed with long metal batons in their hands, seeking to club her into unconsciousness and then into death.

* * *

“They wouldn’t take you to the theater, or even get you a tape of _Toy Story_?” Coulson asked. “Honestly, Garrett can be such a petty d—man.”

Ava heard the word he didn’t say and giggled to herself. “No, he’s a petty dick.”

Coulson’s lips quirked slightly at that, though he tried to give her a disapproving look, it devolved into amusement. 

The sounds of gunshots, automatic fire from an assault rifle, not the slower, quieter shots from May’s pistol broke the mood and brought Ava back up to her feet, rising from behind the cover Coulson had seated her behind, while he waited behind another nearby piece of cover, keeping an eye on the door. Coulson moved instantly to the same cover that sheltered her and pulled her back down as gently as he could.

They exchanged a silent series of looks which effectively communicated her irritation with having to stay down and the degree to which he did not care about that, prioritizing her safety over her vision of the door. Pouting, she stayed down, staring at her knees as Coulson moved a bit away, to ensure that any fire he drew from any invading force didn’t hit her cover.

“That’s true,” he said, responding to her words, not the silent argument. “That’s true,” he repeated.

“You didn’t see it without me, did you?” Ava asked, looking up from her knees with a sudden horrible concern.

“Of course not.”

“Good,” Ava looked back down at her knees. “I’m sorry about the explosion thing,” she whispered.

“Wasn’t you. It was Garrett and whoever’s backing him,” Coulson said, keeping his eyes on her now, “And I promise you, everyone involved in this will end up in a grave, or a cell about the same size as a grave for so long that they’ll wish I’d dumped them in an actual grave.”

Ava nodded slightly into her knees at the vehemence in his voice. Then May’s voice came through the radio. “Mission accomplished.”

* * *

Corpses littered the space around the armory, as the guards and those they were trying to guard had attempted to gather there. May had retrieved a rifle which still had a few shots and a magazine which might work, though her pistol had long since run out of ammunition in the bloody massacre of the mostly unarmed sadists and scientists who’d made up the bulk of the mob. There were so many bodies it made running difficult, but with the bulk of the facility’s staff dead, Garrett would be coming in. He didn’t have much in the way of choice, at least not unless he wanted to call in and explain an air strike within Russian borders to SHIELD higher ups.

Unfortunately, Garrett was not an idiot and was a _hell_ of a tactician himself. He came in all right, but not using standard SHIELD tactics, instead his scouts were spread out in a different overlapping pattern and May’s attempt to slip through ahead of the expected and slower moving SHIELD formation did not work. At all.

One of the traitors was down, the burst of fire from her rifle having walked up his armored torso to his unarmored throat. The rest, however, were closing in fast and May was out of ammunition. Forced to retreat back the way she’d come, the traitors pursued her a bit too fast, so when she took a corner at a sprint, then spun back the other way, they didn’t slow in time to avoid running into her. The first caught a punch to the throat as her other hand borrowed the knife strapped to his shoulder and buried it in his comrade's chest, sliding through the bulletproof vest easily enough. A moment later she had the second man’s pistol and had put down the first. A moment after that she had a rifle pulled from a corpse and was in position to fire on the second set of Garrett’s men as they rounded the corner in pursuit.

The fully automatic rifle at range of less than five meters began to rip through body armor on the third shot. By the time the rifle clicked on empty air, the second team was nothing but blood and viscera. May reached for the second man’s rifle, only to take a nasty kick to the back. She turned what should have been a face plant into a forward roll, over the corpse of the second man, pulling the knife free from his chest in a single movement and spun to face her assailant.

It was Rumlow. The other specialist was good. Quiet, fast, indeed his follow up stomp would have crushed her skull as easily as she’d crushed the guard’s earlier, if she’d been where he thought she’d fall. If only he wasn’t such an arrogant tool, she’d be dead. He had a gun, holstered at his hip, but he hadn’t used it.

“Melinda May. I’d heard good things, before you went soft and decided to play mommy rather than be a soldier for HYDRA,” he flicked his own blade loose and his hand rose, free hand prepared to block a strike for his blade hand, or clear the way for it. His heavy body armor was a point against him here, as it was no more proof against blades then the dead scout’s.

May just blinked back at him, though her mind raced at his reference of the defunct Nazi faction.

“This is going to hurt. There are no prisoners with HYDRA. Just—“

There was a whisper of sarcasm in May’s interrupting words, “Then what do you call Ava?”

“The Ghost?” Rumlow asked, flipping the blade from one hand to the other as his trained eyes watched her hands for the signs that she was making a move. “We’d call her a recruit. Well, before you interfered. Now she’s probably a corpse, unless some pain can bring her back in line.”

May did not scream, or throw her blade, or herself at the man, as that was so obviously what he wanted. Instead she circled around to try to put Rumlow between her and the corridor his scouts had come down. “I see. It’s a shame Coulson won’t get a chance to see if pain can bring information out of you.”

Rumlow laughed, but his eyes never moved. “Can’t say I feel the same. But don’t worry, Garrett’s got a soft spot for the man, it’ll be quick. He’s letting me take my time with you.”

May’s laughter was the hissing of acid over ice, “Is he? Or is he testing you? Do you know what he’ll do when you fail?”

“Against you? Unlike—“

“Against anyone. You know too much to just be reassigned. Someone’s in for an accident before—“ Rumlow was in position and her knife hand moved, sending the blade spinning towards him. He nimbly jumped over the body which might have tripped him as he dodged and so was in the air on an unchangeable trajectory for the moment she needed to slam into him, having leapt the moment the blade left her hand, the moment he’d even begun to react.

Struck while in the air, he had no way to brace himself and they slammed back against the wall. His armor and helmet prevented him from being stunned for more than an instant, which was all it took for May to gain control of his blade hand and drive it into his throat, over and over and over again until he was most of the way to decapitated.

May stood up slowly. “You know, I told him not to try this, but he took it as a challenge. Honestly, kids, what can you do?” Garrett asked from behind her. A quick spin halfway through the first word brought the pistol, held in a professional two-handed grip into view and May froze, letting him talk rather than shoot.

“Is that it? Five survivors out of your entire team?” May asked, counting the dead traitors.

Garrett shrugged, “It was enough, though the clean up on this one’s going to be a _bitch_. How’d Phil know not to tell me where we were going? Can’t be that he suspected me, wouldn’t have brought me along if he did.”

May shrugged in turn, moved slightly and froze again as Garrett lifted the pistol slightly in response, “It was obviously an inside job. He didn’t know it was you, but knew it was someone, so he didn’t tell anyone,” which was mostly true.

“From the way you’re chattering away, it’s obvious you’re playing a part, trying to buy time for the girl and Phil? They won’t get away, more of us—“

“Nazis?” May put in with a raised eyebrow.

Garrett paused for a moment, swallowing some knee jerk response. “You know, the other guys, the true believers will spin this whole tale about how HYDRA wasn’t a bunch of Nazi fuckwits, but some sorta ancient cult, or order of knights, or other bullshit. Me? I don’t give a fuck. HYDRA gave me back my life and an opportunity to pay SHIELD back for leaving me for dead in the desert _and_ an opportunity to really make the world a better place,” his eyes took on just a hint of a zealot’s glow. “How often have we known we could make things better, but had our hands tied by the politics, or the red tape? HYDRA doesn’t do that. If someone needs to die, they die. If someone needs to serve, they serve. You could have been part of that, but, at this point,” he raised his gun apologetically, “unless I get ahold of the girl, you’re going to try to kill me no matter—“

May moved and tripped, arms flailing as she fell over the corpse of one of Garrett’s men, interrupting the man, who didn’t shoot until he saw her pull the man’s body up to shield her and reach for the pistol strapped to his hip.

Bullets slammed into the armored corpse and she blind-fired the entire magazine, except one round, back in the direction he’d been standing. One round drew a line of stinging fire along her arm, but the firing towards her stopped before she stopped shooting. Carefully she put her head out and saw Garrett on the ground, the instant she cleared cover she put her last round into the man, instinct driving it to center mass, which wasn’t too bad as his armor was trashed. It slid through that, but still bounced off something. May stared for a moment, then training sent her scrambling after another gun, or magazine, or anything.

Garrett was up and a flat dive pulled her into a grapple. Garrett had also been a specialist, but he’d been commanding a team for a long time, not keeping up with his training. Rolling with the strike May turned it into an arm-bar, his arm trapped between her legs. She went for the dislocation, only to find the man lifting her, one armed, off the ground and slamming her back down into it hard enough to jar her loose.

It was the surprise as much as the impact which made her let him go, as May, though not a heavy woman, was far too heavy and had too much leverage for that to be a possible counter. Garrett rose and May kicked him in the chest from the ground, sending him back a step and she pushed off him, rolling backwards and landing awkwardly on her feet. It should have done a lot more than knock him back a step. Training and instinct wanted her to close back in, but after the last grapple, she wasn’t eager.

After her eyes saw the metal visible through his torn and bloodied clothes, embedded in his torso, she was slack-jawed for just a moment. Not at the fact that he was a cyborg, though that was a surprise, but at the fact that he’d hidden being a cyborg from the rest of SHIELD for years, ever since that op went bad back in…she’d heard about it, but only in passing, but she was pretty sure it had been in 1990. Five years hiding? They had annual physicals and field ops got checked out a _lot_ more often than that.

“What, did you think I was kidding about the left for dead in the desert thing? HYDRA rebuilt me,” he smirked voice shifting into a bad mimicry of the Six Million Dollar Man’s opening narration, “made me stronger and better, though it cost a _lot_ more than six million dollars and I never bothered playing dead. Thanks, by the by, for the vibranium, it made my cybernetics _so_ much better. You’ve got no id--”

One shot to the back of his skull from Coulson’s gun blew Garrett’s brains out through the front of his face. He advanced quickly with Ava at his back, hand on his belt and put the rest of the magazine into Garrett’s head, back and legs, keeping himself between Ava’s line of sight and the corpse on the floor as best he could.

“May, you good?” Coulson asked, as he stepped around the corpse of his old ally, towards her brain spattered self.

“100%,” she said, snapping out of her fugue state and grabbing a gun off the ground and waving Ava over to her. The girl scampered over as Coulson bent over Garrett’s form, examining the cybernetics now that he was pretty confident the man wasn’t going to sit up again. “Cyborgs? Well, that’s new,” Coulson muttered to himself, even as he shifted to keep his body between Ava and the disassembly/dissection he was engaged in.

“What are you doing here?” May asked Ava as she took up position at the corner, keeping watch as Coulson poked the corpse, then pulled out something he didn’t recognize, but which looked unique and stuffed it in his bag along with the recovered hard drives.

“This was our evac route,” Coulson noted absently as he joined them.

May shook herself slightly, realized she’d run further than she thought in her running combat with Garrett’s troops. “Based on what he said, I don’t think there are any more out there yet,” she relayed to Coulson, as if he’d been there at the time of the conversation, he’d have shot Garrett in the back a lot sooner.

“Then we’ll regroup with Weaver,”

“The professor’s here?” Ava asked, surprised.

“Of course, none of us were going to just leave you,” May said, turning, kneeling down and putting her hand on Ava’s shoulders as she looked the girl in the eye. Mostly. Part of her was watching behind Ava, as Coulson advanced and dropped one hand atop hers on Ava’s shoulder and watched the other way.

In another country altogether, beneath Camp Lehigh in New Jersey, Arnim Zola tried to sigh. As he was a completely artificial intelligence with neither lungs, nor any ability to move air using anything but the fans on the computers that made up his brain, he was not terribly successful. Transmission from Garrett’s cybernetics had stopped, while the agent was at one of the HYDRA operated facilities in Russia. All communications from the facility had stopped almost an hour earlier. Though the transmissions from the cybernetics weren’t video, or audio, or anything like that, the only way they’d stop was if something had stopped Garrett. Permanently. Given that, there was only one right move.

A moment later, a SHIELD transmitter in the Triskelion, which no one remembered installing, but which was on all the maintenance logs, turned off. Nothing traveled at the speed of light to the facility in Russia, to a receiver which needed to receive something quite specific. When it did not, it immediately activated the charges within the facility turning it from a large building into a mass of flaming timbers and wreckage in an instant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this time everyone’s dead.
> 
> Somehow, I don’t think you’ll believe me. Well, we’ll see what the next chapter holds.
> 
> Comments always welcome.


	4. 1995—A Lifesaving Advantage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betrayed, but together and alive. HYDRA will regret that.

Ava saw fire racing towards her, for the second time in her life. Despite her best efforts, to remain in the moment, she remembered the first time fire hard torn her family from her, right in front of her face, but left her unscathed.

This time, however, she knew what she could do and she’d learned from SHIELD, real SHIELD, agents. She’d even learned from…HYDRA? Regardless, she’d learned. And as she shifted, she forced herself to bring Coulson and May along.

She couldn’t do it for long. And it _hurt_. The fire didn’t burn her, but she felt as if parts of her were being ripped off. Despite her best efforts, she screamed, which no one could hear, as she was out of phase with her surroundings. She held herself and the agents out of phase for almost three seconds before she lost control.

They rematerialized amidst the rubble, shattering debris and shrapnel where it intersected with their bodies. Ava collapsed instantly, overwhelmed. Coulson scooped her up and May snapped to her feet, looking around the rubble. Fortunately, they’d been near one of the epicenters of the explosion, so there wasn’t much danger of anything falling on them, but they still moved fast, May in the lead, towards where Dr. Weaver and the armored vehicle they’d arrived in, had been left.

Shielded by Ava, neither of the agents had suffered any ill effects from phasing through the explosion, but they were now suffering near panic at Ava’s collapse.

Coulson felt her pulse as he stumbled through the unstable footing of the rubble which had been the research compound. It was strong enough, but he was still worried, especially as for a moment he thought he felt his fingers press through her flesh. May got them to the vehicle and Coulson passed Ava over wordlessly as he began to work to undo the crippling damage Garrett’s men had done to the vehicle as May pounded on the back of the vehicle. After a moment of hesitation, Weaver let her in and grabbed the spare collar Coulson had brought along and fit it to the girl’s neck.

Given everything, despite what they’d heard over the radio and thought they knew about Weaver, May did not leave the vehicle to cover Coulson’s back as she wanted to. Instead, she stayed inside with the doctor and watched over Ava, not-at-all-coincidentally making sure that if Weaver was a HYDRA plant and that whole play had been put on for their benefit, she couldn’t just drive Coulson over and escape with Ava.

Thirty seconds later, Coulson pounded on the hood and told them to try to start the vehicle again. Thirty seconds after that, the armored vehicle was on its way, missing its antenna, but otherwise mostly intact, racing down logging roads in the Russian wilderness on its way to somewhere safe.

Or it would have been, if any of the three adults had had any idea where exactly was safe at the moment. Coulson chose a destination however and they were well on their way there when Ava finally woke up, to the massive hugs, concerned questions and shouted glee (from May, Weaver and Coulson, as the driver, respectively).

Everything was good. At least until they got to their destination.

* * *

Clint Barton let her stand at his back as he went up the stairs. It made his back itch, but he trusted he wasn’t showing anything but trust in his new recruit. A few quick movements and he’d entered the security codes to let them into the safe-house. It should have been empty.

It wasn’t.

Separating swiftly and silently, he and the Widow took up position on either side of the kitchen door as they could hear movement therein. “I could hear the security system disengage. You can come on in, I’m just making myself a sandwich.”

Shock flowed through Clint. Of everyone who SHIELD might have sent (though they shouldn’t have sent anyone yet, as far as they knew he was still on mission and on schedule), he really hadn’t expected Phil Coulson. The senior agent was, well, you couldn’t be soft and be one of Fury’s protégés, but Coulson was who got sent when someone needed handling, or recruiting (indeed, he’d recruited Clint himself), or the nice sort of investigation/interrogation. He certainly wasn’t who got sent to force a recalcitrant assassin to carry out his mission. Especially not since so much of his time was spent on his pet project at SciTech. Indeed, some people were starting to make noises about the man going soft, but not where May, or anyone who’d trained with her, could hear. And, after a few incidents, not in Clint’s hearing either.

Clint flashed a SHIELD handsign at Natasha, all too aware that she knew all their handsigns, but he didn’t know hers. A slight nod was the only response, though whether she’d actually follow his request that she remain where she was that was an open question. “Phil, buddy, you know I was just about to report in about all this. The situation’s a lot more complicated than we thought when I got my orders and a bit of…flexibility is needed here. You understand.”

Coulson was standing in the kitchen, one hand holding a closed bottle of beer, the other holding a plate with an impressive sandwich and some chips on it. To anyone without the right training, he probably looked innocent and not at all like a man holding two improvised weapons and with at least two hidden weapons under his coat.

“Clint, you’re lucky your job generally doesn’t generally require you to talk,” Coulson said, pushing past him and out the door, to the dining room, where Natasha no longer was lurking.

“Huh?”

“I’m not here for whatever pile of shit you got yourself into, though it sounds fascinating,” Coulson said, taking a seat at the dinner table, which put his back against a sturdy wall and gave him clear lines of sights on both entrances to the room and waved the junior agent into the seat which put his back to the door, forcing him into a subordinate position with rather less subtlety than he usually managed.

Clint sat down, eyes narrowing with concern as to what had brought Coulson out into the field.

* * *

Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanoff was an unhappy woman. Switching sides was a hard thing, even if her side was gone. The Red Room wasn’t her side. This new Russia wasn’t her side. She’d been trained since birth to serve the Soviet Union and that was gone now, leaving her bloody handed in service of…what? Oligarchs and strongmen? Tyrants and child-stealers? She wanted something better, and Agent Barton had offered it, but this new man changed the situation. She was sure she could manipulate him, but doing it _while_ manipulating Barton might be tricky.

As she considered that and tried to evaluate the man, Coulson, based on Barton’s reactions and the few glimpses she could catch of him, she suddenly realized that despite the patent impossibility of it, someone had snuck up on her.

No, they hadn’t snuck up on her. They’d been so silent she simply hadn’t noticed them when she shifted position. She turned slightly to try to catch the other figure in her peripheral vision without giving herself away, only to have that figure nod slightly to her, clearly indicating it knew it had been seen.

She turned to face the figure and saw a woman, a little taller than herself, swathed in shadows, with her face hidden. After a moment of hesitation, the figure twisted slightly to show the SHIELD badge on her upper arm. After an exactly identical moment of hesitation, Natasha nodded slightly, keeping her eyes on the other woman throughout the movement.

The woman slid a fluid, graceful step forward and Natasha slid an exactly identical step backwards, maintaining their mirror image posture and not noticing until a second too late that that pushed her out of her hiding spot and into Coulson’s line of sight.

A polite invitation sent her inexorably down the table to join Agent Barton on one end of the table, but she didn’t sit down, any more than the other woman did, who followed her out of hiding and took up position at Coulson’s elbow.

“So, why are you here, if not for concern about how I’m handling, or not handling, my mission?” Clint asked, carefully not looking at Natasha as he asked the question.

The older agent noted the deliberate not-looking and glanced over at Natasha. “Introductions first, Clint.”

“Agent Phillip Coulson, Agent Melinda May, this is Agent Natalia Romanoff,” Clint said, carefully not saying what she was an agent of.

“Ah, the Black Widow,” Coulson said, recognizing the name to Natasha’s invisible dismay. May’s reaction was subtler, but muscles tensed then relaxed as her vigilance intensified, to the extent that was possible. “I’m surprised Fury would send you to recruit her,” he watched Clint’s not terribly well-hidden reaction, “ah, he didn’t. Assassination then?” Clint’s reaction and her own controlled lack of reaction told the rest of the story easily enough.

Coulson laughed. “Well, good enough. So, he’s trying to bring you into SHIELD’s embrace instead of the ground’s?” Natasha nodded slightly. “Then you may not want to hear this. Last chance to walk away,” Coulson said, voice suddenly absent of anything resembling the humor that had filled it seconds ago.

Natasha sat down silently by Clint.

“Approximately a month ago, my lab at SciTech was destroyed. It was believed the resident thereof was killed.” Clint opened his mouth to express his condolences, but Coulson’s dead level drone continued on over it. “That was a lie. John Garrett and various unknown coconspirators destroyed the lab to kidnap its resident for their own purposes. We discovered where the resident had been relocated and went in, successfully retrieving them. Fury personally assigned Garrett to lead the backup team. At the point when we succeeded, he turned on his own team, massacring the ones who were not traitors, then attempted to kill us. He failed. His men are dead. He is dead. The facility was destroyed by some sort of dead man’s switch while we were escaping.”

“Shit,” Clint said, shocked by the news, so shocked in fact he didn’t notice Coulson’s slowly intensifying attention as he watched for any signs that either of them might be involved in this treason. Natasha did notice it.

“Before his death, Garrett claimed to be working for HYDRA,” May put in from behind Coulson’s shoulder.

That did provoke a response from both of them, though it was more incredulity than anything else. Despite herself, Natasha had an emotional reaction to the name. She’d been raised to fight for the Soviet Union and the casualties and horrors inflicted on her people by HYDRA’s war machines and experiments had filled her nightmares, when she’d been allowed to have nightmares.

“Which may, or may not, be bullshit,” Coulson said, keeping his eyes on Clint and Natasha. “What isn’t bullshit is that the man was a cyborg and hid it from SHIELD for more than five years,” Natasha did not react to the word cyborg. She knew she did not react. But Coulson’s eyes still focused on her. “What also isn’t bullshit is that SHIELD somehow didn’t notice that he had metal implants throughout his body for almost five years. And then Fury sent him to be my backup.”

May’s hands moved and there was a flash of metal in them. Natasha moved instinctively, only to freeze when she recognized it wasn’t a knife or a gun, but some piece of machinery which May placed on the table beside Coulson’s plate.

“Does this look like something you could miss on a physical?” Coulson asked glancing at the large metal object, but not touching it, instead taking a bite of his sandwich to give everyone a chance to consider his words and find their balance.

Clint got up and approached the device, examining it carefully, then passing it to Natasha, who took a single look at it without taking it from his hands. “This is…Garrett was…HYDRA? Seriously? What the fuck!” Clint said in a stuttered mess that conveyed her own feelings pretty well.

“I’m not coming in from the cold until we know more about what’s going on. These,” May produced a small bag and placed it on the table, “are computer drives taken from the facility. You have a mission for which decoding devices is an entirely possible requirement. I would appreciate it if you would return me decoded drives. I do recommend practicing your lies before you say them to the local SHIELD folks.”

Clint stared at the drives for a moment. “How can you be sure he’s on your side?” Natasha asked, tone clinically detached from the current situation.

“I can’t. But I’ll either get intelligence from the drives, or I will rip it from his bleeding and broken body after he reveals himself to be a traitor,” Coulson said, voice equally quiet and level. The silence that followed that was broken by him eating a handful of chips one at a time. Then he smiled suddenly. “Now, would you like to tell me what you know about cyborgs, Ms. Romanoff?”

The implicit threat was not missed by her. The fact that he’d seen some reaction in her to the word and the fragments of metal was more intimidating than the threat. She considered lying, but there were possibilities here, which hadn’t been available when it was just Clint and her.

“Nothing solid. But back in the Red Room, the trainers used to tell stories about what happened when girls didn’t finish the job. They said that the Winter Soldier was sent in and killed everyone. And they said he had a metal arm.”

Coulson’s head cocked. “Difficult to believe there are multiple groups with cyborg technology at the moment,” he muttered.

“The Winter Soldier is a myth and has been for decades. I heard about him growing up,” May put in.

“Maybe, but HYDRA should have been a fucking corpse, but they’re up and walking around, allegedly,” Coulson said to her, then turned back to Natasha. “So, this Red Room might know about the Winter Soldier?”

“If anyone does, they do.”

“Interesting. Do they know you’ve turned?”

“No. But I don’t have access to the files and they aren’t going to answer my questions. That’s not how they work.”

“Let’s discuss the Red Room,” Coulson said with a slight smile as he pushed aside his plate with most of his food still uneaten. Paper appeared in May’s hands and then there was a pad in front of him.

“There are approximately twenty-three trainees, girls between eight and sixteen, who’ve survived to the present.”

“Trained, armed and loyal?” Coulson asked, though Natasha could see a little bit of irritation at the answer which was not focused on the security protocols which was what she’d known he wanted.

“Yes, but—“

“So a frontal attack is out,” Coulson said to May, ignoring her attempt to explain why he shouldn’t do something he wasn’t going to do anyway.

“Any successful attack and they’ll blow the charges which will drop a hundred feet of rock down onto the bunker,” Natasha put in.

Coulson’s eyebrows rose slightly. “They really don’t want the whole ‘using orphan children as weapons,’ thing to get out, do they?”

There wasn’t really any response to make to that.

“What about an unsuccessful one? Would they evacuate afterwards?” he asked

“During, probably,” Natasha answered.

“So, there’s more than one way out?” May asked.

“It connects to the sewers, catacombs and basements in several places, but trying to get in them would drop the roof down as well,” Natasha said.

“And we lack the forces to set up outside each one, unless we bring more of SHIELD in,” May pointed out.

Coulson got up and moved to a wall, did something to it and produced a small box, which he passed over. It contained a small button, as would go on her shirt, which was obviously more than that. Natasha raised an eyebrow at him.

“Passive transmitter. Turn it on,” he pushed slightly on an almost invisible switch on the back, “and we’ll know where you are. When it’s off, it’s untraceable and will pass through any metal detector and not set off any alarms.”

Natasha didn’t take it. “I won’t be allowed to wear my own clothes in, security requires changing into new clothes which are kept within the building. Then you change again on the way out.”

“Is that security, or part of the conditioning?” Coulson asked, head cocked slightly in curiosity, hand still extended offering her the bug.

Natasha considered the question seriously, then realized she wouldn’t and didn’t know the actual answer to that question and just shrugged.

“Security strip remains required if the attack comes while you’re moving in?”

“They’ll leave me to die in the airlock topside before they run the risk of letting anything or anyone unauthorized in. Just like they’ll drop the ceiling on the bunker before they let the rest of the trainees be captured.”

“Rescued,” May put in.

Natasha glanced at her, confused for a moment.

“They’ll kill the girls before they let them be rescued,” May rephrased Natasha’s statement.

“That’s what I said,” Natasha pointed out.

“Not quite, but that’s beside the point at the moment,” Coulson ended the argument before it could really begin, though Natasha could see May didn’t agree with the other agent that this wasn’t the moment for that discussion and she definitely didn’t agree with Natasha’s view that she’d just replaced various of Natasha’s words with synonyms than acted like there was a profound difference in meaning. “Do you have a means to tell us where they’ll come out, as this,” he raised the button, “will, apparently, be unworkable?”

“It’s a spy training school. There are a number of bugs already inside the place. I could get one of them easily enough, but you’d need a scanner capable of picking up its signal and they aren’t the fancy ones you folks have, they’re more directional than positional,” Natasha said.

“You know the frequency?” Coulson asked.

Natasha provided the information and a few moments later Coulson had a heavy piece of equipment pried out of another compartment in the safe house and began fiddling with it.

“How do you know where all this stuff is?” Clint asked.

“I designed this safe-house,” Coulson answered as he began to work on the equipment and got confirmation from Natasha that it would work. Fifteen minutes later they had a plan, then it was just a matter of waiting to put it into effect while Clint went and got the files decoded.

Before he left, he paused at the door to ask if Ava was okay, or as okay as you could be after a kidnapping. Coulson told him ‘no’ and left it at that, to the younger man’s visible dismay. “I’m surprised you trust him, if you’ve been infiltrated,” Natasha said.

Coulson’s eyes narrowed slightly as he examined Natasha wordlessly for a long moment. “Like I said, I’ll either gain the information I want, or I’ll gain a target. Either way, I’ve made progress. How long will you need after entering to be prepared?”

“An hour.”

“Should we expect a garrison on-site?”

“There are guards topside, but down below its just trainees and the Madame. Trainers were brought in for specific classes, but I doubt there will be any there now,” Natasha noted, glancing out the window at the cold night sky. “Seduction training is usually in winter.”

Coulson chose to ignore the horrors behind those innocuous words for the moment, though he filed them away in his head in the box labelled, Things Which Need Killing To Make right. 

“Can you have forces in place that fast?” Natasha asked.

“To just outside Moscow? Shouldn’t be a problem, though I can’t achieve precision in the timing,” Coulson said.

“How are you achieving it at all without using SHIELD resources?” Natasha countered.

“By using SHIELD’s enemies, of course,” Coulson returned with a smile that might have been called innocent if you didn’t look in his eyes.

Natasha nodded. “It’ll take ninety minutes to get there. I’ll see you soon.”

Coulson smiled sweetly, “Let me give you a ride to the area,” his tone made it clear this was not an offer. Natasha glanced at May again, noting callouses, stance and position. She nodded. Not out of fear, but out of curiosity.

She followed Coulson out, accepting the trust he showed by putting him at her back and pleased by the caution he showed by having May at hers in turn. The van he took them to was large enough for them to sit comfortably in the back and filled with advanced technology, filling Natasha with a moment of irritated jealousy at the resources in this one vehicle, which were more advanced than the entire Red Room had and which she had lacked for her entire career.

What she could do with these tools…well, she’d probably find out soon. Maybe she’d even show SHIELD. Depending on how this operation went. And how well SHIELD could be cleansed of the HYDRA taint running—allegedly running—through it. HYDRA. It was difficult to imagine the organization still existed after all this time and even more difficult to believe the Red Room might have useful intelligence on the organization. Say what you will about them, and she could say a lot, they’d been born out of the ashes of the Great Patriotic War and the horrors HYDRA had unleashed during it.

She didn’t see the driver, or anyone else in the cab of the vehicle, but it meant there were at least three SHIELD agents involved in this. And therefore at least three potential double agents, if SHIELD really had been infiltrated as badly as Coulson had implied. The older man began working with the equipment, while May took up position between Natasha and the screens. A few remarkably failed attempts at small talk later and Natasha chose to switch topics to tactical and contingency planning on the operation. That proved a more fruitful conversation and she was sure she saw Coulson’s attention switch over to them several times, though he never looked away from the screens he was working on and May never moved out of Natasha’s sight line.

Finally, they arrived and Natasha directed them where to stop to avoid being seen by the outer perimeter defenses and began her hike in, as the Red Room liked to see people coming from a _long_ way away, that was a long enough walk that she was glad she was wearing the running shoes she’d been in to play tag with Clint throughout the city, rather than anything with an actual heel on it.

The building was the same as ever, the same concrete front as the buildings to either side. The same brutalist designed interior. The same fake apartments. The same sequence to get into the real room. The security sweep was as thorough as ever, though ever since she broke Vladimir’s jaw, they’d stopped leering at her and touched her only as much as was actually required by the search. The clothes she changed into were the exactly same as always, simple, grey, featureless and lacking in pockets. The ride down in the elevator was exactly as long as it always was, she counted, but it somehow felt longer.

She walked the halls as she always did, nodding to the few trainees who were practicing stealth techniques (also known as sneaking food) or on guard duty (also known as attempting to keep the others from sneaking food) and silently noted that that the thieves would eat tonight and the guards be beaten tomorrow, before the switchover occurred, swapping guards and thieves. Coulson and May’s words rang in her head, it was also ensuring that all of the trainees—girls—knew that they couldn’t trust one another and that every victory won by one of the others brought pain down upon themselves. Keeping them divided was crucial to the Red Room maintaining control over the killers it created.

She didn’t shake her head to clear the thought. That was the sort of thing that drew attention and blows. Instead, she made her way to the training room, ignoring the surveillance which was connected to nothing and that the Red Room didn’t have the personnel to watch. One of the bugs vanished into her hand and then into the spot in her sleeve which would keep it in place without being visible. The absence of pockets, like the absence of privacy and individual clothes had security purposes, but it also had psychological purposes, which were obvious if you thought about them.

Before she could consider it at any length, the alarms began to blare. Swift movements brought her to exactly where she should have been when enemies beat at their door. Almost two dozen trainees, ranging in age from eight to sixteen were already there, starting closer to the evacuation route. Weapons were being distributed by the senior ones even as the Madame arrived, two more senior trainees dogging her steps, pulling along heavy rolling file boxes of those files the Madame wanted to carry with her, the Madame was the only one who wore something unique, black, slick and powerful, though the pistols on her belt were the same as the trainees handed to Natasha.

For the first time, she realized that the Madame must have been one of them before. Must have gone through the training, the assignments, the Red Room itself, from which name the organization took its name. That realization wasn’t really anything new. It was obvious if you thought about it, but she hadn’t before. The Madame, like the other Madames she’d known were something apart from the Agents, or the trainees. Something different and better. Seeing this from the outside though, halfway in, halfway out the door to SHIELD, she saw the Red Room not as a great weapon in the hand of the Union, or the malign conspiracy controlling her every step, but rather as a twisted inheritance, training each generation to consume the next in an orgy of cannibalistic excess which produced horrors, pain and corpses. 

For a moment she wanted to just blow the Madame away and then turn the gun on herself. Then she shook off the notion as she belted the weapons around her waist and stretched, a functional stretch, not one for show, though some of the trainees were looking at her, but more for comfort than lust.

“Natalia, take the rear,” Madame ordered sharply as she took up the point position herself, though a pair of the older trainees joined her, acting as living shields to ensure she would have time to draw her weapons and fire should she lead them directly into an ambush. Their weapons were drawn, as they themselves were weapons in Madame’s hands, or at least at her voice.

No one asked any questions, Madame would tell them what they needed to know, when they needed to know it. The urge to shoot the woman in the back of the head for that unthinking arrogance was surprisingly powerful, but in the end, that wouldn’t solve anything and beyond even that end, the Madame was almost as much a victim of the Red Room as everyone else. That didn’t mean she didn’t have to die, but it did somehow mean that she wasn’t the power Natasha had expected to face. She hadn’t seen through Natasha’s treason the moment she saw her face. She hadn’t seen through Coulson’s plan the moment it began.

* * *

The truck they were loaded into was a large one which appeared to be as military surplus as the four guards who were riding, two in the cab with the driver, and two in the back, their assault rifles dangling as they kept both eyes on the collection of girls and women who’d handed over their weapons as they got in (except Madame). That might have been a sign that they correctly appreciated the danger they posed, but Natasha was quite sure it actually indicated a lack of professionalism and more than a little bit of lust.

Leaving the guards as the only armed members of the party (except for Madame) was just another way of indicating, of _proving_ , that despite their skills, the Red Room remained loyal to the state. Not for it the machinations of the military, or the intelligence agencies as they scrambled for power in the collapsing Union. The Red Room served, it did not command.

The truck pulled to a stop after less than an hour, but it hadn’t pulled over, just stopped in the road. Natasha, seated between the trainees and the guards, where she could eliminate both of them in an instant if needed, kept her eyes on the open back of the truck.

The doors on the cab of the truck opened and she heard footsteps as the driver and guards, she could clearly hear three sets of feet step down onto the concrete, military boots stepping down precisely with no attempt at stealth. Then there were more sounds, sudden thumps and grunts that drew the eyes of the junior trainees, while Natasha’s and the more senior trainees kept their eyes on the weapons and the open back of the truck.

Then there was a movement in the shadows behind the truck. The guards didn’t hear the fight, didn’t see the shadow, distracted by a vehicle which was pulling up behind them, a small car, and jumped down, guns in their hands.

Coulson stepped half out of the car, one hand spread, the other still inside the car as he huddled there for cover, hapless smile on his face, every inch the random civilian, confused and concerned by the presence of the soldiers. His distraction was all that was needed for Clint to fall on the guard on the left and May the one on the right. A submachine in Coulson’s other hand came free and pointed quite directly at Madame in the back of the truck. She hadn’t even gone for her weapons.

The SMG was a modified Israeli Uzi, with an extended magazine. Without looking away from Madame, or letting his hand even waver, he retrieved a second weapon. With the extended magazines, he could sweep a wave of death over the entire truck in an instant.

Madame didn’t react to the threat in any way beyond a single raised eyebrow. “I take it we have you to thank for this unscheduled stop.”

Coulson smiled slightly. “Of course. How else could an agent as junior as myself get a meeting with the august Madame of the Red Room?” there was no hint of mockery in his words. “After all, who else could help me hunt the newly resurgent HYDRA?”

That provoked a response from everyone in the truck, with Natasha reacting just a moment too late for it to appear genuine. But with all eyes on Coulson that wasn’t obvious.

“HYDRA died with the third Reich,” Madame said, conscious of the eyes of the trainees and the trained gun of Coulson. She didn’t let her hands move towards the guns on her hips, or the other weapons she hid, but neither did she spread them in some pantomime of surrender.

“So I thought as well, until we discovered one of their facilities hidden in your own country. And we discovered that there were infiltrators within my own agency,” Coulson said calmly.

“SHIELD has been infiltrated by HYDRA? You claim that?” Madame asked, making one of the little leaps in logic which were so impressive to the trainees. Even knowing how it was done didn’t make it less impressive. Natasha could not have identified Coulson as SHIELD merely from what Madame had seen. The phrasing however made it clear that the older woman was, in fact, troubled by Coulson’s words.

“The traitors claimed that. Unfortunately, the destruction of the facility following our victory ensured we have…limited physical evidence and none of the traitors survived to be interrogated. They are undoubtedly traitors and it’s hard to believe any other faction would claim to be HYDRA if it were not true. The difficulties imposed on recruiting alone, for no concomitant advantage…”

Madame nodded slightly.

“And HYDRA always was good with technology. It would explain the whole cyborg thing,” Coulson said, pseudo-casually, though Natasha could see the tight focus on Madame and her flankers at that word.

Madame didn’t react, but one of the two guards did, almost invisibly. Coulson noted it, even more closely to invisibly and Madame noticed him noticing it, without bothering to make it invisible. Instead, she cuffed the guard on the back of the head sharply.

“So, you’re hunting the Winter Soldier and think that claiming him as HYDRA will cause me to help you?” 

Coulson’s laughter was a broken blade being used to saw through some dense material, hardwood or bone. “I wish that were true, Madame. The Winter Soldier is a means to HYDRA, not the other way around.”

“Says the man who claims his organization is infiltrated by HYDRA. Hardly a surprise given the way your lot were snatching up Nazis after the war with your Operation Paperclip. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

“As opposed to Operation Osoaviakhim?” Coulson asked sweetly. “We’re hardly the only ones who were at risk of infiltration. Or subject to it, apparently.”

Madame’s eyes acknowledged the point, even if the reference to the Soviet version of the Allies’ sanctuary-for-scientists program irritated the patriot. “Indeed not. You certainly infiltrated us quite well to set this up with so,” her eyes flicked over the trio standing behind the truck, “few forces. But then, Natalia has always been a problem child,” she slid one step directly to the left to put Natasha’s body between her and Coulson’s gun.

Coulson smiled, “Now, this is an interesting question. Do I confirm it because it’s true? Do I confirm it because it’s false and I want you to believe it’s true? Do I confirm it because it’s false, but I want you to believe that it’s false by telling you that it’s true? And that’s without even getting into the possibility of denying the accusation,” he handed the submachine guns to May and Clint as he advanced towards the vehicle. “Honestly, this would be a delightful opportunity for a game of verbal judo except for one thing. I do not give a single _fuck_ about you or yours. The Red Room is nothing to me. I’m on the trail of HYDRA and I will show them what happens when _I_ cut off their heads,” he pulled the fragment of material he’d retrieved from Garrett’s corpse and tossed it into the truck to skid to a stop by one of Madame’s booted feet. ”Trust me, nothing is going to be growing back. Now, are you going to help, or are you of no further use to the Soviet Union, humanity, or me?”

There was a tense silence as everyone considered the question and absorbed the threat. Then Madame glanced at the metal, not away from Coulson’s challenge, of course, but at the metal. A tiny movement of a hand and one of her guards grabbed it off the floor and held it up for her inspection. After another moment, she extended a hand and a file was placed in it, she examined its contents and the metal in front of her. And the decision was made.

* * *

Natasha glanced over at Madame while they lay in the dirt looking down at the facility. There were guards, but not many of them and they were moving around the perimeter to keep out vagrants, not patrolling the grounds against actual intrusion. For a moment she considered the ridiculous situation she found herself in and how it had arisen. Madame hadn’t been certain of her treachery, but if she was a traitor, she couldn’t be left with the trainees, and if she wasn’t, then Coulson couldn’t leave her with the trainees. Without instruction, they were a hiltless knife, lying on the ground, waiting for someone to pick it up and cut themselves, or someone else. May and Clint were continuing the evacuation of the trainees to a neutral location. Natasha was surprised Coulson had stripped himself of his allies and she could see Madame wondering where his remaining backup was.

It was possible they existed and were so good neither she, nor Natasha had noticed them, but Natasha was beginning to believe that Coulson had actually stripped himself of all his allies for this strike. Either that, or he was foolish enough to imagine she, or Madame were allies. Working out the infiltration plan was more complex than usual. Partly because it wasn’t simply Madame giving objectives and Natasha figuring out how to carry the out. Instead, everyone wanted to be everywhere and not rely upon any other member of the team as they didn’t trust them.

Whoever went first would have an opportunity to alert the guards, whoever went last would have the opportunity to shoot their predecessors in the back, or just withdraw and leave them unprotected and flapping in the breeze.

Madame was coming up with elaborate arguments to place herself into each and every position, which Coulson was simply accepting each time, which, in turn, prompted Madame to change what position she wanted for fear she was walking directly into his trap.

Natasha was actually a little amused by all of it, which meant that Coulson’s patience was the first to snap. “Fine. You have the point, you,” he flicked a finger at Natasha, “have the rear, and I’m in the middle. Move out.”

It was the voice of a commander giving orders and instinct made Natasha (and Madame for that matter) want to obey, but training held them in place until Madame’s head nodded slightly accepting this ordering, mostly because she was tired of the argument as well. “One modification, Natalia will take the point, I’ll take the rear.”

“Fine. Let’s move.”

They slid through the guards like a knife, like one of Natasha’s knives, through butter. They never even came close to being spotted, despite Coulson’s slight clumsiness and the fact that it had been years since Madame did any fieldwork. She was still better than Coulson, but not as good as Natasha, the younger agent noted to her pleasure. The internal security was non-existent. The base had the run-down look Natasha was all too familiar with, especially recently. The Soviet Union was gone and the new Russian Federation was run by a handful of failed spies and the oligarchs who’d arisen from the industrial, or criminal (to the extent there was a difference) groups. Everything was crumbling.

But, if this was truly being run by HYDRA, it should be in better shape, not sinking beneath the weight of failure which was dragging down Russia. The interior led to a single elevator shaft, which led down. A security system not dissimilar to that of the Red Room, but lacking the competent external security. Rather than summon the elevator and whatever security it had, they forced the doors (after close examination) and repelled down the fifty meters to the elevator and slipped in the hatch on the top, Natasha went first, guns out, landing easily on flexing legs, ready to shoot whoever was present, only to find the elevator as empty as the shaft above. The others followed and the doors opened a moment later, after only needing to disable one alarm.

They slid out and down a hall to a single room at the end, with a single occupant, or so they thought at first. The man sitting at the computer was not actually looking at the computer, but rather at the television and the pornography he was watching on it. Natasha took him down silently, not knocking him unconscious, but bringing him down and putting enough pressure with her gun under his chin that he couldn’t scream without impaling his jaw on her gun barrel. She wished she could have let him pull his pants back on first, but she was in a bit of a hurry.

Coulson and Madame looked around, and came across a cryonic preservation tube (though they would only discover that later), which was a bit of a shock, as was the cybernetic arm the man had. None of that was so impressive as to warrant Coulson’s very visible shock.

Coulson turned to face Natasha and the prisoner and knelt by him. By his face. “Is this how you serve? You should be ashamed.”

“Sir, it’s been years, I’m still here and I still serve,” the man’s voice was that of a fanatic as he chose to endure the pain of shoving his jaw into Natasha’s gun, his heels clicked together, “Hail HYDRA!”

Coulson took his seat at the unlocked computer and began to flick through the electronic files, ignoring the man and leaving him to Natasha’s and Madame’s mercies, such as they were. The moment the questioning began, however, he began to convulse, foaming at the mouth as he committed suicide the instant he realized they were not truly HYDRA.

Thirty seconds later, after confirming the man was dead, Natasha and Madame spread out to examine the hardcopy files. Coulson joined them after a few minutes as they began to gather the files. “Sneaking out isn’t going to be possible,” Coulson said as they gathered six file-boxes full of hardcopy files.

Madame flicked a glance at him and smiled in a manner which should have been attractive, but wasn’t. “You underestimate us, agent. Natalia, distract them while we escape.”

Natasha glanced at Coulson slightly, not looking for a nod, as that would have given away the game, but rather curiously, wondering if he caught that the fact that Madame hadn’t given orders to distract them nonlethally meant that she expected them to die. 

If he did, he didn’t care. They moved out quickly, carrying the boxes and copied files to the van they’d taken. Natasha killed the guards. She didn’t have to. They weren’t skilled. Outmaneuvering them, or separating and restraining them was feasible. But they were HYDRA. Cut off one head and two more would take its place. Unless you burned them out. Root and branch. No survivors. No mercy. No hesitation.

Natasha drove as the other agents began to go through the files in the back. She kept one eye on them in the mirror. Even at that remove, she saw the moment Coulson found something as his entire body tensed and then forcibly relaxed. “Well, I know where we’re going next.”

“So do I, the port so we can get out of here,” Natasha put in.

“Yes, I meant after that.”

“Where are we going?”

“To see an old friend.”

* * *

“Yeah, but I don’t know what that means,” Natasha pointed out.

“I know, wouldn’t want you folks to think cutting my throat and leaving my corpse by the side of the road was a good solution. I’ll tell you soon enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments always welcome.


	5. 1995—Ruthlessness Is Also An Advantage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A visit to an old friend.

May looked over at Andrew, “We may want to reconsider having kids of our own,” she said glancing out the window at the herd of children that was running around the snow covered field that was her mother’s extremely large yard.

“I think not having twenty at once may solve quite a few of the problems,” he countered with a slight smile. May had contacted Andrew and her immediate family when she realized HYDRA’s infiltration was a real problem. She’d been glad that they’d gone to ground in a safehouse, when she realized she was going to end up babysitting the Red Room victims, with only a barely-not-a-teenager archer as assistance. It was something of a no-brainer, if a risky one, to link up at the safehouse.

May grunted slightly, nodding even more slightly. She was tired. Even for her, there’d been a _lot_ of activity over the last three days since they got off the cargo ship which Coulson had gotten them onto. The girls had been good while hidden on the ship, but then they’d unleashed all their pent-up energy on the safehouse.

Still, it was nice to see them doing something besides playing endless wargames. At least some of the younger ones. The older ones were more indoctrinated, but separating them and giving them adult work, sentry work, kept them mostly out of trouble and from dragging the younger ones back into bad patterns. It also kept them from messing with Clint too much. The agent had pretty good self-control, but it wasn’t infinite and they were clearly having fun with him.

They also tried to have a bit of fun with Andrew, but the amusement he didn’t bother to attempt to hide made it clear just how much that was failing. They’d apparently expected her to leap to her husband’s defense, as though he needed it, and had been surprised when she did not. Eventually it occurred to them that he didn’t actually need protection from them unless they actually attacked him. Which they hadn’t. At least not after May’s demonstration bout with the oldest of them.

Coulson’s arrival, sans Madame and Natasha was a bit of a surprise, but apparently they’d come to something of an understanding, and were willing to stay away from the girls, at least until HYDRA was dealt with (or they had sufficient other trustworthy allies to double-cross Coulson and May). Besides, there were _plenty_ of documents to be reviewed, even though Coulson had found something that would lead them to their next step.

“And when do we bring SHIELD into this?”

“When we know who we can trust.”

“And when will that be.”

“Quite soon, I’ve got a plan.”

“Good. We’re away?”

“Yes.”

“All of us?”

“Not the kids,” Coulson said.

“Then we need to leave someone. Andrew and Weaver? Unless you need them?”

“No, that’s good.”

“They’ll also need someone with espionage or martial experience, they barely respect Andrew and Weaver as it is, and mostly because I _make_ them.”

“This is your mother’s safehouse, isn’t it?” Coulson asked sweetly.

May’s death glare was impressive, but under the circumstances she didn’t actually have a better idea. “I’ll make the call,” she said through gritted teeth.

Saying goodbye to Ava was hard. Fortunately, Andrew was there and Ava had actually met May’s mother and liked the old woman. A hug goodbye didn’t help much. Leaving behind the adoption paperwork for her to fill out did.

* * *

“Where too?”

“To see an old friend,” Coulson said, melodramatically.

May rolled her eyes at that. “Right, but coordinates?”

Coulson passed them over to her.

* * *

Jasper Sitwell was having a very long day. Everyone who thought they were in the know was running around after Coulson. Everyone who _was_ in the know was hiding from him. The hit on the Winter Soldier facility was reverberating through the strands of HYDRA’s network of spies and cells like sound along a plucked guitar string. Only less melodious and more blamey. And shooty. And explosive. And poisonous. Literally.

His modest apartment was comfortably appointed, as befit a mid-level bureaucrat and after a long day of work he liked to open his refrigerator and retrieve a cold beer, as befit a mid-level bureaucrat, and then put up his feet and relax while drinking that beer, as befit a mid-level bureaucrat.

His instinctive reaction to hands grabbing him from behind, bashing him into his refrigerator was not that of a mid-level bureaucrat. Instead, it was the reaction of a trained agent, spinning under the shove, dropping down and striking back at where his opponent had to be.

Or that was what was intended, as his spin was checked by a hand from behind and he found himself pinned against the white metal of the refrigerator as another small hand, his assailant was female some part of his brain noted, retrieved the gun he kept in his shoulder holster and the knife he kept in the small of his back, then frog marched him into the dining room where Coulson was sitting at his table, in his favorite chair, eating his left-over pizza and brand new chips and drinking his cold beer.

His assailant, who had to be May, released him and shoved him forward, stepping back into the kitchen from which she could see Sitwell, Coulson and the door Sitwell had locked when he got inside. Sitwell straightened his jacket, glanced back towards May, but he could only see a shadowed outline of her in the kitchen, as the lights were out and he hadn’t made it home until well after sunset.

“Phil, this is a surprise.”

Coulson picked up the first potato chip from the ones he’d spilled onto his plate beside the half-eaten piece of Hawaiian pizza and ate it, as noisily as he possibly could.

“Everyone’s looking for you.”

Coulson continued to eat, ignoring the other man. When the silence became unbearable Sitwell spoke again.

“Where have you been?”

Coulson finished eating, got up, turned his back on Sitwell and washed his dish, letting the last few chips go down the garbage disposal and flicked it on. The machine crushed the chips, then ran loudly for a moment until Coulson turned it off and back to face Sitwell.

He ignored the other agent’s question and presence completely, seeming to be talking to the air as he walked back to the table, past the man. “Ava’s dead. She died alone. In pain. Thinking that she’d murdered May and that I hated her.”

Sitwell’s eyes widened, “I’m sorry to hear that, what happ—“

All the air left his body as Coulson placed a precise punch in passing to his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. Words couldn’t come as air wouldn’t come, but Coulson’s hands did come, down onto his shoulders pulling him back up and over to the sink.

“I killed Garrett for that. Put him down like the rabid dog he was. Then, funny, thing, turned out,” Sitwell tried pull free and got a kick to the back of his knee, forcing him down, face and free arm in the clean metal of his sink. “ _turned out_ ,” Coulson repeated louder, “that he was a cyborg rabid dog. So we went looking for cyborgs and you know what we found?”

Sitwell had enough wind back to choke out a demand to be released.

“We found a cyborg all right. A cyborg assassin,” Coulson laughed the laughter of a man who’d looked into the abyss and decided that a world with such monsters in it was clearly the joke of a mad god, so he might as well laugh, “just when you think you’ve seen everything. Can you believe that?” As Coulson was elevating Sitwell’s trapped right arm, forcing him up onto his toes and deeper into the sink, the agent couldn’t manage a response. “Actually, I haven’t seen everything,” his laughter was a broken thing. “Didn’t see Ava die. Didn’t make it in time. But I did see that cyborg assassin kill the Starks. Gunshot and strangling. That’s how they died. But then I remembered, my good buddy Jasper Sitwell investigated their deaths, so that couldn’t be right. I thought they were messing with me. Faking the evidence. So May and me, we went on a little trip to the Stark family mausoleum, broke a few marble plinths, is plinth the right word?” he asked the air, then continued, “or whatever you call the thing that they use to block off the interred body from the world. Oh boy were they _ripe_ , but you know, even _years_ later I could see how they died, and car accidents don’t cause those wounds. So, my good buddy Jasper was a fucking traitor.”

Coulson had elevated Sitwell’s arm so far that the other man’s face was smashed into the steel of his sink and his feet lifted off the ground. With his stomach pressed into the rim of the sink, he simply couldn’t say anything, until suddenly Coulson lowered the trapped arm, letting him find his footing, lift his face off the steel and answer. “I’m not a trait—“ he was cut off by Coulson slamming him back into the sink, freeing a hand and flicking the garbage disposal to life.

A moment of having his face pressed against the metal as the grinding blades spun under it, vibration shaking cheekbone was unpleasant, but then Coulson flicked the disposal off.

“Now, my old friend is going to help me handle this little nest of vipers. Either by being a source of information, or a terrible example I can use to extract information from others. Which is it?”

* * *

Jasper Sitwell was not a mid-level bureaucrat. He was a connection between several HYDRA cells within SHIELD and their higher command structure. A great many names were known to him and what little they could cross-check from other sources indicated that he was at least accusing the guilty. He might also be accusing the innocent and not naming all the names he knew, but he was, at least, accusing the guilty.

It was, therefore, somewhat distressing to him when Coulson and May were chased away by gunfire and he was retrieved by his masters. Which ones he wasn’t entirely certain, but regardless, it was bad. HYDRA did not forgive betrayal, any more than Coulson had, any more than SHIELD would. Jasper Sitwell was a man without a country as he was drugged unconscious and freed from the chair Coulson had tied him too.

He was a man without bladder control when he awoke in a darkened room, alone. That wasn’t standard SHIELD practice. They preferred armies of faceless suits to this stylish, if formless dread. Entering alone, in an incredibly expensive suit, not waiting around for Jasper to awaken in a cheap one, that said HYDRA to his well-trained eyes. The woman who did those things was older, hair white, straight and short, with nails to match.

Though she was clearly in charge of gun-carriers like those who’d driven off May and Coulson, this was the woman who made them dangerous, not the other way around.

HYDRA Academy training reasserted itself, as she walked to the table he could not sit at, as he was bound by a collar around his throat to a ring in the wall. It gave him maybe four feet of turning room, enough to sit uncomfortably, but not enough to lie down, or reach the table with its, apparently comfortable, chairs. She ignored him completely, as she opened her (also expensive) briefcase and began to work on the papers within.

If he spoke first it would be taken as a sign of weakness, but of course, he was in a weak position. Admitting that was just common sense and doing otherwise might be viewed as arrogant. However, interrupting her while she worked on HYDRA business might well be case as treason, if she was in a bad mood. It was a classic no-win situation, as HYDRA liked to put its targets in.

Arrogance was better than treason, so he waited, mind running in circles. They clearly wanted something from him, or he would never have woken up. 

Finally, she finished her paperwork and looked over at him. “Ma’am.”

“We know everything you know. We know you talked. Did you manage to hold _anything_ back?” she asked, voice calmly disinterested, which suggested that there might still be a chance at survival, so long as he said the right things and told the truth _and_ Coulson didn’t get lucky.

“I only gave up unimportant members of the Outer Circle. I didn’t betray anyone born into the cause, or anyone trained at the HYDRA Academy, or anything about Chief Carson. I didn’t give up _any_ operational details, or anyone outside SHIELD. This is bad, I admit that, but it was always going to be bad, from the moment Garrett failed to cross off Coulson and his team.” Shifting blame was always a good strategy, especially onto someone who couldn’t shift it back, seeing as they were dead.

“Not bad,” she said to herself.

“Thank you, ma’am, this is still salvageable. All we need to do is convince SHIELD that Coulson’s the traitor. We’re already halfway there, with everything he’s done and he’s clearly close to the edge. An attack on me, a few hits on the names I gave him and we can mobilize SHIELD’s entire infrastructure to hunt down the traitor,” Sitwell offered, going almost stream-of-consciousness in her relief.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said, rising and turning to face the door, “Not bad?” she said again, this time it was clearly a question.

“Excellently done, indeed,” Coulson agreed, entering the room.

For a moment Sitwell experienced complete white-out and panic. Then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and realized he’d been played. When his eyes opened the woman was gone. “Jasper, Jasper, Jasper,” Coulson said, having taken the seat the woman had vacated, “you’re in quite a lot of trouble. In fact, given the recording we have of your answers to my questions and to her questions, you may be in the most trouble of anyone, anywhere. Traitor to SHIELD, traitor to HYDRA…I think at this point, your only chance of survival is if HYDRA goes down in flaming ruin. Otherwise, you’re a dead man.”

Sitwell nodded, silently. There was nothing in what Coulson said that wasn’t true. The other agent wasn’t trying to rush him into making a mistake, or blurting out something he didn’t intend to admit, the time for that had passed. Coulson had maneuvered him into making a mistake and now he was doomed unless he did what the other man wanted. Painful as that was, for a trained operative, especially one who’d specialized in playing other agents, he couldn’t avoid the truth of it. Not if he wanted to survive to leave this room.

“Well, shit,” he said to himself.

* * *

“We know enough to roll the dice on Fury and Hill,” Coulson said.

Madame gave him a sharp look. There were others she wanted to bring in, the problem was, most of them were on the list Sitwell had given and the rest were dead. Fallout from the disappearance of most of the Red Room was continuing throughout Russia, as former operatives scrambled for new allegiances and HYDRA sought to snatch up the dropped weapon.

May, Clint and Natasha were sitting around the table with the other two. “If you’re wrong, it’s going to be a short conversation,” Clint pointed out.

“I didn’t say we’d be rolling all our dice on Fury and Hill. We’ve got a lot of information on HYDRA, but it’s all centralized. One mistake and we’re corpses and our evidence is lost. I’ve made copies of what we can make copies of. Clint, you’ll deliver your copy to Hill, May, you’ve got Fury. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be hitting the facility Sitwell didn’t want to tell us about. Camp Lehigh.”

May shot him a sharp look. Her friend’s obsession with Captain America was well known, choosing the operation which put him in his hero’s shoes wasn’t a surprise. Taking along the Russian murder machines, and only the Russian murder machines, was.

“Weaver’s meeting us en-route to handle any technical issues. It sounds like they may be significant, if Sitwell was telling the truth,” Coulson said reassuringly, as if the presence of the scientist would assuage May’s concerns.

“Arnim Zola. Hard to believe he could truly still be alive,” Madame said. “His war machines butchered millions,” she shook off the rare moment of introspection and gave Coulson a furious glare. “And SHIELD protected him from the consequences of those actions for fifty years. Well, justice delayed, not denied, at least.”

Natasha flicked a glance at Coulson in turn and he shrugged, ignoring the barb. “Feel free to make sure Hill and Fury know that we’ve taken precautions and the evidence will be release should anything…untoward happen to us, or you,” he said to May and Clint.

The specialists nodded, collecting their files as everyone moved out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always welcome.


	6. 1995—Deals Are For the Keeping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finishing matters takes blood and explosives.

Deep under the former Camp Leigh, in a bunker that SHIELD, and time, forgot, lay Arnim Zola’s mind, transferred from flesh to metal, pried from his dying body by his loyal HYDRA agents and by his own genius. Not that the few operatives who penetrated the facility knew that was what was speaking to them when they accidentally turned on the machine.

“Coulson, Phillip James, born 1965; Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna, born 1977; Valerianovna, Ilyasova Ekaterina , born 1939,” it said.

Natasha’s eyes flicked over to Madame. Whatever it was, it had been right about her, had probably been right about Coulson and that suggested it might be right about Madame. The current head of the Red Room was supposed to be a ghost, however.

“Facial recognition and access to more than just SHIELD databases. Neat trick, but I expected more from HYDRA’s chief scientist,” Coulson muttered, as Madame and Natasha spread out, expecting trouble as they’d obviously been located.

“Correct! In your description and your expectation” the voice shifted slightly, accent thickening to a thick Swiss-German from its almost mechanical first words. “I am almost impressed, and I am Arnim Zola, Chief Scientist of Hydra and its resurrector.”

“An interesting claim, I admit to doubting it,” Coulson said, not even really bothering to hide the fact that he was baiting the alleged corpse.

“In 1972 my body failed me, but I had myself transferred to 200,000 feet of databanks, the work of the last years of my life. The crowning achievement of my life. You stand amongst my brain and doubt me, agent?”

Coulson frowned slightly, “Interesting claim, but I have to wonder, if you are truly Arnim Zola, it seems…improbable that HYDRA would simply abandon you down here in this dusty bunker. Surely they’d have better uses for your genius.”

It was not a subtle gambit, but whether it was due to the mild language barrier, or his having been trapped down here alone for two decades, Zola was easy to flatter.

“Oh, they do, but there is no need for them to be present to do so. Just as there was no need for me to be present in order to detonate the laboratory you and your raucous compatriots raided twenty-eight days ago. Starr, Ava, born—“ he cut himself off, then continued, her face flashing up on the monitor in front of them a mass of green lines, “is such an interesting subject. I look forward to the data from our studies of her. The one thing I do miss is…experimentation. Still, there is always hope. Some of the new work with robotics and cybernetics is extremely promising. Until then, I will simply have to rely on Dr. Whitehall and the others to carry out the physical work, under my guidance, of cour—“ he cut himself off. “So, you’ve managed to locate my external lines of communication. And jam them. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice that?”

“I hoped. Regardless, we have you prisoner. Your fate is entirely in our hands. Given how much you were willing to give up to survive before, I think you will answer my questions rather than allow me to rip your mind apart,” Coulson glanced around the endless rows of computers, “quite literally.”

Zola laughed, “Before? Yes. Now? The Red Skull was a man of vision, compromised by madness. I took the vision and refined it, purified it in the fires of battle, tempered it in the despair of defeat to forge a sharper, truer HYDRA. We will protect humanity from the madness and chaos that their freedom has led to. Look around you, is this a sane world? An orderly world? The Red Room is no creation of HYDRA. Nor were any of the 0-8-4’s you handled, Coulson. Terrorists, monsters, the paranormal, all running loose all the time. Only HYDRA can bring order—“ 

“And,” Coulson cocked his head slightly as something occurred to him, “there is a distinct lack of internal security, cameras or otherwise. How are you seeing us? Ah, there they are,” his hand moved and bullets shattered Zola’s cybernetic eyes, blinding the man. He turned back to Madame and Natasha. “We’ll need to search the place for other surveillance and then get the techs in here to…extract the information we need from his mind.”

“I will NOT be taken alive and used against HYDRA,” Zola snapped, voice crackling and furious.

“Alive?” Madame asked, voice showing some true emotion for the first time in Natasha’s experience.

Coulson spoke over her, “Well, we’ve cut off your ability to summon assistance, or launch any sort of strike on this place, and I think we disabled the facility’s self-destruct on the way in,” he smiled nastily. “Not that it matters. I rather doubt you went to all that trouble to survive, just to commit suicide now. No, you’re too confident in your own cleverness, too sure you’ll wiggle out of whatever fate is coming for—“ his head cocked and he paused, “Or could there be more than one of you? Or more than one layer of you here? If you’re just computer code…why not multiple copies?” The screens went black and the sound of whirring tape drives stopped. “Kill the power, before he can wipe everything,” Coulson snapped and the trio separated, yanking power cables from the wall urgently.

It took almost half an hour to run down the endless hallways, yanking power cables free. Then they regathered in the main area. “Weaver’s going to have fun with all this, but we’ll need additional techs if we’re going to get anything real out of this, I’m going to have to talk to Fury.”

“There are…alternatives,” Madame said, with a lengthy pause, a sidelong glance at Natasha and then sliding into position between Coulson and the elevator bank, her subordinate at her back.

“There are always alternatives, this is the least bad one. After all, I keep my deals, even if I am almost the only one left who does.”

“Don’t be that way, agent. You did well, it’s just time for someone with more experience to take over. This is not some gang of neo-HYDRA children, this is the real thing. No more games. No more hostages. No more _bullshit_. I am taking over this invest—“ Madame twisted aside, instinctively kicking backwards, knocking the gun from Natasha’s hands, even as it came to bear.

Natasha could have sworn she made no noise and Coulson’s eyes hadn’t flicked over to her. Still Madame had ducked away. The follow up kick did connect, as did the one after that, jarring loose the gun Madame was drawing. Natasha took Madame down hard, but the older woman slipped free, going for her second gun, but Natasha got there first, ripping it free, just in time for Madame to knock it from her hands and send it sliding across the floor towards Coulson, who’d drawn his own gun and stepped back.

“Natalia? You betray the Red Room? You betray your nation? You betray yourself?” she asked, punctuating each question with a blow. Iron training meant she didn’t say, or even think ‘you betray me?’, but she felt it and the fury came through in every blow.

“Yes, no, and no,” Natasha responded. “And Coulson, you agreed to let me handle this,” she said as the SHIELD agent’s gun tracked Madame.

“And I will,” he said, not verbally adding, ‘if you can,’ but he wasn’t going to lose an agent as skilled as Natasha to her pride.

This place was not where Coulson would have chosen to honor his agreement with Natasha, but he wasn’t entirely surprised by Madame’s sudden treachery. It had always been an alliance of convenience and her hesitancy to lose the sunken costs of the trainees she’d handed over to Coulson. Well, that and the lack of information about what HYDRA was planning/capable of. It would hardly do to double-cross Coulson and break his neck, only to fall to HYDRA’s machinations. 

“You suborned her?” Madame asked, flicking a gaze over at Coulson, which was, of course a trap, Natasha’s second weapon came out, then flew away, when Madame responded correctly, but Natasha made her pay for it, landing a blow in the pit of her stomach that forced the older woman to bow and lose the air in her lungs. Despite a complete lack of oxygen, Madame twisted away from the knee which tried to smash her face, collapsing onto the ground and rolling to wrap herself around Natasha’s one leg which was still on the ground, levering it so they fell in a sprawling pile of limbs.

Coulson’s gun continued to track whichever bits of Madame were most exposed and didn’t have important bits of Natasha behind them.

Natasha kicked free before Madame could dislocate the captured knee. The kick landed hard against the top of her skull, stunning her for a moment, just long enough for Natasha to spin into position and get arms wrapped around her neck and legs wrapped around her waist like she was a murderous spider. Drawing her arm tight across the older woman’s windpipe she cut off air and blood alike. Madame slammed her elbows back into Natasha’s side, over and over again. Natasha ignored the pain and tightened her grip.

“You remember what you told me, all those years ago? I’d be a weapon in the hands of the state? A protector of the people?” After each question whispered in Madame’s ear, she pulled tighter and tighter. “You remember what you ordered me to do over the last year? The fires? The bombs? The poison? You remember. I remember,” she pulled back, thrusting up with her hips to stretch Madame’s back, the arm across the older woman’s neck grabbing her own shoulder, “but that was all destroyed with the Red Room, only Intel made it out, not history, which means,” her other hand pushed into Madame’s back and she jerked the other way, snapping Madame’s neck, “now,” her voice dropped even further as triumph did not come, “only I remember.”

She rolled free and snatched up one of the weapons lying on the ground, careful to never let its barrel move in Coulson’s direction as she brought it to bear on the dying woman and unloaded the entire magazine into her former superior.

Coulson holstered his pistol. “Such a shame that she chose to double cross us. Still, I appreciate your protection, agent. It will prove most useful in convincing SHIELD, or whatever replaces SHIELD, that you can be trusted.”

Natasha nodded slightly at his reframing of events, but she didn’t look away from Madame’s extremely dead body.

“Are you all right?” he asked politely, closing in, but staying out of arms reach and not stepping between her and Madame’s corpse.

She nodded, but didn’t move. Coulson moved a few steps away, then carefully knelt and checked Madame’s pulse. She was very obviously dead, but Coulson hadn’t survived this long by accepting the obvious. “I’ll be back with Dr. Weaver in a few minutes,” he said to the almost non-responsive woman and gave her some privacy.

Then he gave her some more time as Weaver began to examine the tech, cursing the lack of adapters between her modern SHIELD tech and the thirty-year-old HYDRA tech.

She did not recover.

“Shit,” Coulson muttered to himself, then waved Weaver deeper into the stacks of computers.

“Natasha?”

Nothing.

“Agent Romanov?”

Nothing.

“Shit.”

Nothing.

“Why did I send May to talk to Fury again?” Coulson muttered.

“Because she’s the only person in our group other than yourself Director Fury might trust,” Natasha answered.

“Come now, agent, you know better than that. Fury doesn’t trust anyone, but you’re right that May’s words may carry some extra weight,” Coulson said, awkwardly trying to continue the conversation.

Natasha nodded slowly. “Not unlike Madame in that regard.”

“There are other differences,” Coulson noted.

“We’ll see,” Natasha responded.

Coulson did not step closer, but he did slide between her staring eyes and Madame’s corpse. “Yes, we will. Let’s go see, shall we?”

With the vision of the corpse of the woman who’d raised, trained, tortured and sterilized her blocked off for a moment, Natasha slowly raised her green eyes to meet Coulson’s brown ones. “Yes, let’s.”

A brief conversation with Weaver later, Coulson and Natasha were removing the body and sealing Weaver in with her supplies and tools and cell phone (for all the good the latter was going to do given that none of them had had a signal since going underground).

* * *

After visiting Deputy Director Hill, and dropping off the papers, Clint had vanished into the ether and returned to assist May’s mother in defending the girls. The precautions he’d taken against being followed proved to be completely unnecessary.

May, however, followed Director Fury’s orders when he told her to stick around after dropping off her files and explaining the situation. Coulson and Natasha rendezvoused with them after elaborate and excessive spy shenanigans.

“Agent,” Fury said with a slight, cold nod.

“Director,” Coulson matched his nod exactly.

“Your intelligence checks out. We’re going to need to move on everyone simultaneously or this is going to be messy. The head of Operations is amongst the traitors, as are most of his hand-picked lieutenants.”

Coulson nodded, resisting the urge to point out that he’d provided that information and didn’t actually need it repeated back to him.

“For the most part, this shouldn’t be too hard as HYDRA is a small percentage of our people and we are the most infiltrated agency. However, there are two critical areas where HYDRA’s infiltration is at critical mass. The first is at the Operations Academy. More than two thirds of the instructors and three quarters of the security staff are HYDRA.”

That Coulson hadn’t known as they weren’t names he’d recognized and without access to SHIELD databases, he hadn’t been able to run their current jobs.

“The second is the _Illiad._ Almost its entire marine contingent is compromised. Most of the crew and all of the command staff except the marine commander are clean. Hill and I will be coordinating everything. Your team will handle the Academy end as you’ve been there, nonstop, for years.” Coulson heard the implied critique in the emphasis Fury put on ‘nonstop.’ “I’ll be deploying Agent Hand to the _Illiad_ , as there have been enough issues to justify sending internal security over for a visit.

“Understood, sir.”

“At the moment, everyone in SHIELD has orders to detain you on sight, I can’t withdraw those without revealing we’ve been in contact, so you’ll need to take that into consideration,” Fury said.

Coulson nodded slightly. “We’ll need to have some means to convince the non-HYDRA guards to stand down.”

“We’ll need to cut communications to prevent word from leaking out, we will not be able to achieve exact simultaneity,” May pointed out.

“I have that under control and it will resolve the…you issue,” Fury said.

“I assume that will also resolve the timing issue?” Coulson asked.

“Indeed, you’ll know when to make your move. And not just because it will be 1907 hours where you are.”

“You really aren’t going to tell us what you’re going to do?” Clint asked, surprised enough to back-chat the director.

“I think recent events more than justify my…withholding of information,” Fury said

Coulson nodded, even though some part of him wanted to point out that if anyone could be trusted, this group could.

* * *

“Agents of SHIELD, please direct your attention to the nearest computer, phone, or other communication device for an unscheduled announcement from Director Nicholas Fury,” a recording of Deputy Director Hill said over an image of SHIELD’s logo.

“Agents, SHIELD and other agencies have been infiltrated by HYDRA. A list of compromised agents in your area has been sent to you, if you see those agents, detain them with whatever force is necessary. This is not a drill. Agents Coulson and May uncovered this threat and it has been independently confirmed by Agent Hand, Deputy Director Hill and myself. Use of lethal force is authorized. We will cut this cancer from our agency. Clean sweep boys and girls, clean house.”

“That should do it,” Coulson said to the air from the back of the van he’d rented, which was waiting at the front gate to the SHIELD Academies, while he was waiting for May, Natasha and Clint to clear out the guard post. He slid into the driver’s seat moments before May raised the gate and reboarded as Natasha and Clint moved overland towards the Operations Academy, rifle and bow ready for action, while Coulson drove directly to the Academies’ main armory, jamming the van into its entryway.

“Glad you got the insurance,” May muttered as she rolled down the window and slid against the door, forcing her borrowed credentials against the card reader and punching in the override code she’d been given which let her move into the armory itself.

Coulson slid back into the back and opened the side door, giving himself a clean line of sight along open lawns for the light machine gun they’d mounted back there. There were three people in there, along with the corpse of the one, non-HYDRA agent who’d been stationed there, murdered before he could even read the list and discover his companions were traitors. They’d spun to face the opening door, but May didn’t enter as expected, instead diving through her open window, rolling under a metal table piled high with the weapons the HYDRA agents were packing into bags to be distributed to their fellows.

She scythed the feet out from one of them, twisted the other way and rose, catching the second HYDRA agent and hurled him into the remaining, still-standing, traitor, buying herself a second to visually confirm with her memory and the images provided by Director Fury that these were, in fact, HYDRA agents. With that done, she grabbed one of the loaded rifles off the table and took down the two tangled agents with a burst of automatic fire and instinctively jumped onto the table a moment before the downed agent managed to pull her pistol clear and put a shot where May’s leg had been. One step across the table and she put a bullet through the woman’s head as she tried to rise.

A quick search of the armory and she returned to join Coulson, taking over the close guard while Coulson climbed onto the van and then onto the armory’s roof, taking the sniper rifle she passed him and taking position on the roof, scanning the area for any movements of HYDRA agents on the ground.

Meanwhile Natasha and Clint had taken up position outside the Operations Academy, slicing through a few small patrol groups. HYDRA had reacted, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, fast and were retreating back to the main Operations Academy building, taking the students hostage. As a tactic, if wasn’t bad. As a strategy, it had a distinct lack of any sort of long-term goal.

They split up in a flurry of hand signals, Clint circling to the back as Natasha covered the front, awaiting any attempt by HYDRA to poke their head out. As they called out that they’d kill hostages if anyone came in, they probably weren’t heading out anytime soon. With Coulson in overwatch position, May moved into the SciTech campus, rendezvousing with their, mostly uncompromised, security team and leading them back to replace Coulson, Natasha and Clint on guard duty and she dragged the younger two agents along with her on her way to the Communications Academy while Coulson took over the Siege of the Operations Academy, attempting to talk the traitors down.

The battle there in the Communications Academy was a giant mess, as HYDRA agents in the area hadn’t been as numerous as at Operations, or as few as at SciTech and the Communications Officers simply hadn’t had the skill, or equipment, to stand up to the more heavily armed and better trained traitors. They’d traded off numbers for skill, leaving dozens of agents dead and small armed groups occupying different parts of the buildings as the Communications Academy was, ironically enough, completely without inter-group communications (except for bullets).

The trio of elite operatives approached from the rear and linked up with a group of loyal agents and then acted as the tip of the spear for them to punch through other groups of agents, usually loyal, but occasionally HYDRA. Friendly fire was more of a danger than anything else and more than once they stumbled over groups of loyal agents shooting at one another.

Meanwhile Coulson was attempting to restrain his fury as he spoke to the HYDRA agents. A quick explanation of the extent of the disaster HYDRA was undergoing was amusing and helped convey the precise nature of their fuckedness, but though he did a good job of demoralizing them, he didn’t actually have that much to offer. There was no chopper to a country which hadn’t signed the SHIELD treaties, and they knew if they did get one, SHIELD jets would shoot it out of the sky before it got five miles. The biggest problem of the negotiation was that the HYDRA agents didn’t know what they wanted, besides for this not to be happening.

Six hours later, Coulson turned back on their power, cutting the exterior communication lines except the ones which led to his newly assembled command tent, so they could see the news reports announcing the arrest, or death of essentially everyone involved in HYDRA. Then he gave them three hours to surrender, or he’d destroy them utterly.

He started hearing gunshots less than an hour later, as the HYDRA agents knew he wouldn’t actually let the timer reach zero before he acted. Small groups began to trickle out, some HYDRA agents surrendering (though a few went down under fire from inside the building, which was, in turn, silenced by sniper fire from Coulson’s forces) and others released hostages with HYDRA agents mixed in and a few were entirely released or escaped hostages as other HYDRA agents attempted to buy themselves some forgiveness.

Forgiveness was in very short supply for neo-nazi infiltrators of intelligence organizations. But those who released their hostages did get a somewhat greater supply than those who did not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments always welcome.


	7. 1995—Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Endings.

“It appears I owe Mr. Pym an apology,” Coulson said to the air.

“Whatever for?” the air answered him. As Coulson recognized May’s voice even though he hadn’t heard her enter, he only jerked halfway to his feet before he relaxed back into his chair.

“I thought he was a paranoid, delusional pain-in-the-neck,” Coulson said.

“Ava’s really changed your vocabulary,” May noted.

Coulson shrugged.

May accepted that he didn’t want to talk about it, “So is Pym not paranoid, not delusional, not a pain-in-the-neck, or not any of them?”

“Well, he’s definitely a pain-in-the-neck, but it looks like Carson and company were actually looking to steal his tech. And Howard Stark was being fed information by them to try to duplicate it.”

“I suppose you’re going to say we should reach out to him, given our losses?” May asked.

“No.”

“Good.”

“File review is almost done,” Coulson said, sending the file on Mr. Pym into archiving, without flagging it as needing further action. “It hasn’t turned up many new traitors, but it’s kept everyone pretty busy and distracted while things settle down and Director Fury suffers the slings and arrows of the Council and every government under the sun holding hearings. But at least we found them first and we weren’t the only ones compromised. If anyone else had found them…”

“Didn’t happen. Not worth thinking about,” May said as she resumed her seat and began flicking through her own files. 

“Are the girls settling in?”

“Relatively well. Though Andrew is beginning to make noises about needing to hire a specialist in child psychology. He’ll have some recommendations he’s planning to pitch at dinner tonight.”

“I’ll do what I can, but it’s not like I’m in charge of hiring p—“ Coulson began.

“Yet,” May interrupted him

“We’ll see. Director Fury wasn’t exactly thrilled about the way I handled this.”

“He can hardly _not_ promote you under the circumstances,” May pointed out.

“And, I’m not entirely sure I want that,” Coulson didn’t look up from the papers he was examining. “I’m not even entirely sure I want to stay with SHIELD.”

Silence stretched as May stopped working for a moment, surprised.

“Really?”

“I’m not sure. I—look—I know you and Fury and, well, plenty of folks think I’m naïve, and maybe I am. But I joined up to be part of SHIELD, to protect people and all this, HYDRA, everything, it’s just shown me how long it’s been since I protected anyone.”

May opened her mouth, but Coulson continued.

“Except Ava. And we both know how much shit we’ve taken to our faces from half of SHIELD for that. And we both know how much shit the other half has been talking behind our back. The jokes about mommy and daddy haven’t been subtle and haven’t just been coming from the folks who turned out to be HYDRA.”

May frowned slightly. It hadn’t been that bad for her, but she’d solved it via impromptu ‘training sessions’ which ended the mockery, usually without knocking anyone unconscious. Usually. Still, thinking about it, there had been quite a few comments which hadn’t risen to the level of requiring (or allowing) correction, but which indicated…disapproval of two SHIELD agents wasting their time in this fashion.

“They give everyone shit,” May pointed out.

“Yes, but the question is what for? Giving Garrett shit for once fighting a man with lion paws is one thing,” he paused for a moment as his go-to example now had unfortunate undertones, “giving people shit for protecting a child is another. SHIELD has become too much the sword and from what I’m hearing no one’s planning to fix that. It’s all about how we need to be sharper to avoid this happening again.”

“And your leaving solves that problem…how?” May asked, turning her attention back to the files, but keeping the man in her peripheral vision.

“Fair point. If my staying can solve it.”

“And the kids? It’s not just Ava, there’s all the Red Room survivors.”

“True. The fact that the Red Room news leaked out as part of the HYDRA story does provide some cover and limit the uses to which SHIELD might put them.” There was a moment of silence while they considered that leak and the complete failure of any investigation to turn up how it had happened. Neither of them asked any questions, because neither of them wanted any answers on that point. “But then again, we’ve seen how they leaned on Ava even with us present.”

May nodded slightly, not pointing out that none of the other girls could walk through walls, making them much less attractive weapons, as that would simply undercut her point. “No decisions now though?”

“No decisions now. Except which files need further review. And what I should be bringing to dinner tonight.”

“Ava.”

“Besides Ava.”

“Ask Andrew, I haven’t had a chance to ask what he’s making.”

Coulson laughed.

* * *

“This guy’s really Bucky Barnes?” the agent asked his companion, examining the cryo-chamber carefully. “That doesn’t seem possible, even for this place.”

“Yeah, well, we were fighting HYDRA yesterday, so I’ll buy it might be Barnes,” the other agent said. “Though, since we’re relying on HYDRA records, maybe not.”

The first agent leaned close to the glass over the frozen man’s face and stared in, trying to make out features past ice and glass. “I don’t know, he certainly looks like Sergeant Barnes in the old pictures. I guess it could be plastic surgery or something, but that seems like a _lot_ of work for something which most people wouldn’t even notice.”

“Except the man who actually found him. Might convenient that it was Daddy Coulson who found him.”

“Maybe. But if this was really Barnes, I’d have thought Coulson would be down here with his all-girl class giving a lecture on the nature of this guy’s relationship with Captain America.”

The other man laughed.

* * *

Victoria Hand was beginning to lose her mind. File review was something she was good at and enjoyed, but discovering how deep HYDRA had wormed its way into SHIELD was painful and it just went on and on and _on_. Still, she dug through every file with her usual professionalism. And so it was that she noticed something odd. An entire team of HYDRA agents sent on a mission and died. Odd. Everyone involved, including the backup team, who’d actually been SHIELD, was dead, but for one agent, who had vanished. The agents were connected to a Mr. Whitehall, who’d caught a sniper bullet to the head attempting to escape from a SHIELD kill team two weeks ago.

She prioritized review of his files and found things which she would have called crazy, but for her own comparison of Whitehall’s photograph to that of Werner Reinhardt, one of the original members of HYDRA, reportedly dead of old age years ago, while Whitehall looked exactly like Reinhardt sixty years earlier. 

He was hunting ‘Inhumans’ people with superhuman powers. Apparently he’d found one, once, which he’d used to rejuvenate himself. The records of his experiments actually made her vomit, which wasn’t something she’d done since the first time she shot someone.

She looked into the missing agent. It wasn’t easy, given most of her resources were on lockdown while SHIELD figured out what it was doing. But a few conversations and a called in favor from an ex-girlfriend in the Mexican Federal Police had the agent delivered to her. Roughed up rather more than she’d wanted, but he’d apparently kicked the crap out of three of their people before being taken in and they hadn’t taken it too well.

Richard Lumley claimed he’d been considering turning himself in after the reveal of HYDRA, but it still took a certain amount of convincing for him to explain what he knew, which wasn’t much. A pile of corpses and a baby girl who’d been hidden by using a deceased agent’s credentials. That was enough to get her on the right track and find the girl, now almost seven years old and apparently a perfectly normal girl.

Then it was just a matter of putting Lumley out where the folks who’d killed the HYDRA agents (and Lumley’s partners) could find him. Well, after getting permission to leave the base with one of the few intact strike teams. One counter-ambush later and Hand was having a truly bizarre meeting with the pair of murderers who’d been hunting the agent. One of them was, she’d assumed, the twin of one of the women experimented on by Reinhardt, only to realize, after putting her foot in her mouth, that the woman had apparently survived the HYDRA agent’s obscene experiments. That almost caused the tense standoff to burst into violence. That was when she’d brought out her prop, in the form of Reinhardt’s head in a cooler. Unfortunately, the man of the couple reacted with absolute fury at that, apparently he’d wanted to murder the Nazi and was not really good at internalizing his emotions. Fortunately, Hand’s second trump card, the hostage/spokesgirl in the person of the child Lumley had been hiding, went much, much better.

Thus began the strangest conversation of Victoria Hand’s life. And she’d had some _very_ strange conversations. Fortunately, neither one of them wished to engage in violence in front of their daughter, so she was able to have quite an interesting conversation. Handing the girl over wasn’t really something she was comfortable with, but holding her back was going to end in bloodshed. And the girl did want to be reunited with her, self-proclaimed but not obviously lying, parents. The temporary truce was holding for now, as she opened communication with the ‘Inhumans.’

* * *

“And May and Andrew live just three houses down,” Coulson explained to an earnest, if pouting, Ava. She’d wanted to live with May _and_ Coulson, which had made her relationship with Andrew a little awkward. Well, that was what she said, Coulson thought it might be more that the lab building she’d lived in for almost three years was ashes and SciTech was being rebuilt from the ground up. Her home was gone and choosing a new one had not been nearly as fun a process as Coulson had hoped, as he’d been unable to convince her to get involved.

“I can go see May?” Ava asked.

“Sure, let’s go,” Coulson said.

“I can go on my own!” Ava snapped.

“All right, you’ve got your alarm?” Coulson asked.

Ava held up the keychain which had the small device which would emit a high pitched squeal if she pushed a button, as well as signaling his own system.

“Got your tracker?” Coulson asked.

She nodded and stomped one foot, the one with the tracker in its heel.

“All right then, if May’s not home, come right back,” Coulson said, despite knowing it was over the top. The area was quite safe, housing mostly SHIELD agents or affiliated personnel, and security was tight. Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to not say it.

Ava nodded slightly and stalked off, tapping the locked collar around her neck. The key to the lock was on her keyring, with the alarm. Well, a key to the lock. Another sat on Coulson’s key ring and a third on May’s. She wanted the collar, she loved the collar, but she still resented that he had a key to it, though not that May had a key to it. It was a little irritating.

On the other hand, she had helped him carry up all her stuff to her new room on the second floor. Private bathroom, walls she could put things on, a distinct lack of metal fixtures or random scientific equipment. It was everything she’d said she wanted, at length, repeatedly. But she hadn’t gotten it on her terms and so was being a bit grumpy about the whole thing. Moving out was one thing, having your home burned down so you have to move is another altogether. Intellectually he understood that, but he was getting a bit tired of taking the blame for something which wasn’t his fault.

Or at least, he had been, until May pointed out in three words and a few hand gestures that it was only because Ava believed he _should_ have been able to prevent it that she was being so grumpy with him. They’d taken HYDRA apart in months, if they’d just done that a few years earlier none of this would have happened. And from Ava’s perspective, _he’d_ taken HYDRA apart in a few months. It was hard to remain irritated at someone who thought you were superhuman. Even, or especially, if you weren’t.

Things would get better once she was settled in. And learned to do the things she wanted to do without incident. Giving her a bicycle had been good, but she had not handled her failure to instantly master the vehicle, especially as smaller children rode by without training wheels. She wasn’t giving up, but she was also not a _lot_ of fun.

On the other hand, she had gotten _really_ into decorating her room and he’d successfully replaced all the Disney posters. Even the signed ones. Which hadn’t been entirely straightforward, but was worth it when he saw her smile. Sooner or later she was going to figure out they were replacements. Not that he’d lied, he just hadn’t pointed it out, but that was going to go poorly.

But for now, he had his own stuff to set up and he hadn’t trusted a moving company, which meant that he was mostly handling it himself (tempted though he’d been to offload it to May, as he usually did with things which required physical ability). So there was plenty for him to do while May “played” (or sparred) with Ava.

* * *

May was sitting on the couth with Ava. She’d worked the girl until she was damn near exhausted and May herself was feeling a bit of strain on her muscles. Ava was relaxed, tired and unlikely to react too badly, leaning on May as she rested.

This was the moment. Coulson joined them with the papers. “Ava, I“ May did not correct that to ‘May,’ a rare show of cowardice from the operative, “found something in HYDRA’s files about your father,” he put the papers down on the table in front of Ava, who’d stopped leaning on May the moment Coulson walked in.

Ava leaned forward and began looking through them. The language was Russian, so it wasn’t much help to her, but the pictures showed her father, her family and some of Dr. Pym’s research.

“What does it say?”

“It was a textbook asset recruitment operation. Began with threats against his job, coercing him to take actions which got him fired, then offering a replacement job, then when he tried to walk away, he was in so deep that threats of turning him in to the police were sufficient. By the time he was set up in Russia and realized threats of criminal action weren’t realistic, they had his family in custody.”

Ava stared at him in horror for a moment, though whether it was at his description of what her father had gone through, or his analysis that this was a ‘textbook recruitment operation,’ the likes of which he might have carried out in the past himself. She glanced over at May, who nodded slightly, to both possible questions. They had carried out such operations and it had been carried out, quite skillfully, by HYDRA’s operatives within SHIELD. Though their positioning had made that somewhat less challenging than it otherwise might have been. Having your own agents in place to receive any request for protection, combined with confession the new to-be-asset might make was rare indeed.

Ava reached out, paused for a moment and looked at Coulson, hands an inch from the pictures and files. He nodded and she took them, scrambling away from May and Coulson both as she retreated to the bathroom to examine the files and consider what she’d learned, not least about her protectors/friends/parents?

May raised an eyebrow at Coulson, who shrugged in return, that had probably gone as well as could be expected.

* * *

S.H.I.E.L.D HQ-DI December 18, 1995

MEMORANDUM FOR all agents.

SUBJECT: Reorganization.

  1. Due to recent events, S.H.I.E.L.D. is being reorganized. The Operations-Science-Communications division failed to prevent HYDRA infiltration. Therefore SHIELD is being reorganized into multiple divisions, seven geographic and three operational, each of which will be subjected to increased oversight.



  1. The World Security Council is appointing eight Oversight Officers, who will have complete access to any and all S.H.I.E.L.D. operations. A full list of the Officers is attached as Enclosure 1. Procedures for dealing with Officers are attached as Enclosure 2.



  1. The geographic divisions are: North America, South America, Europe, Northern Africa, Southern Africa, Northwest Asia and Southeast Asia. Exact Geographic boundaries are defined in Enclosure 3. Geographic commands are responsible for general security operations within their areas of responsibility.



  1. HYDRA files have revealed a large number of individuals with unusual abilities. Two divisions are being established to handle these individuals. The first, headed by Agent Coulson, will handle ‘Enhanced’ individuals. Enhanced individuals are those who were born without such abilities but have subsequently gained them. The second, headed by Agent Hand, will handle ‘Gifted’ individuals. Gifted individuals are those who are born with unusual abilities. Precise procedures for handling such situations are attached as Enclosure 4.



  1. The final division will answer directly to the Office of the Director and ensure internal security. Procedures for interacting with this division are attached as Enclosure 5.



  1. All agents have been assigned to one division. A complete list of all assignments is attached as Enclosure 6. Procedures for requesting a transfer between divisions is attached as Enclosure 7.



Nicholas Fury

Director, S.H.I.E.L.D.

* * *

“So, you aren’t leaving?” May let her voice rise, as if it was actually a question.

“No. I can actually help,” Coulson answered her.

“Good.”

“Though it’s going to be a while until I get to get back into the field.”

May smiled, “I weep for you,” she said, without in any way changing her expression.

“I thought you might,” Coulson said drily. “And much though I would like to return the favor, you have a job.”

“What’s that?” May asked.

“Obadiah Stane, CEO of Stark Industries, was providing arms to HYDRA. He’s claiming that he thought he was providing weapons to SHIELD. I’m pretty sure he’s full of crap. Full file’s unlocked on your console. I want to know if the largest arms manufacturer in the world is being run by a HYDRA sympathizer.”

May nodded. “How am I going in?”

Coulson gave her a not terribly nice smile. “Well, there’s Agent Hartley,” he teased, remembering the agent’s involvement with Stark and May’s protective reaction to the idea that Hartley be assigned to babysit the boy. May gave him a glare and the humor drained out of him. “If she survived the _Illiad?_ ”

“Survived, but she’ll be in rehab for six months before she’s back up to full,” May said.

Coulson nodded, slightly shamefacedly. Most of the fun of torturing May was gone now, so he got straight to the point. “Well, who you use is up to you. Officially we’re looking into claims that Stark Industries is producing some sort of enhancement serum/cybernetics/whatever. Use your imagination. Pull whatever people and resources you need from the division.”

May frowned. She really didn’t like to be in charge of anything that required more than: ‘Defeat all enemy forces,” but under the circumstances couldn’t really bring herself to complain, much. “Don’t’ want to leave this for Fury’s internal security folks?”

“This isn’t internal security,” Coulson argued. “Stark has never been part of SHIELD and when word leaks out about his parents….he has the potential to be a real problem.”

May looked at him, stretching slightly, not speaking the suggestion as her hand tapped her waist where a pistol would hang. Coulson cocked his head, considering, then shook it slightly. Assassination at this stage was premature. Still, Stark would eventually find out about his parents. If Stane was more involved than review of HYDRA’s files had yet revealed, he might even know and be able to reveal it to the lad at the worst possible moment. Assassination of Stane was also premature, but less so.

“Understood, I’ll pick out my team and start,” the pause would have been imperceptible to anyone but Coulson, or Andrew, “investigating,” some small part of Coulson thought that even Andrew might have missed the tiny frown that last word brought to her face for a single instant, before her usual mask of impassive calm returned.

Coulson clapped her firmly on the shoulder. “Good. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

May just gave him a look. “Casa Blanca? Really? And you imagine _you’re_ Rick Blaine?”

Coulson laughed.

**End of Book 2.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments always welcome.


End file.
